


Brain, Tongue and Heart

by screamlet



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: #coulsonlives, Angst and Humor, Banter, Crossing Timelines, Everyone Hates Tony's StarkPhones, Gen, Multi, POV Multiple, Recovery, Science Bros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-09-06
Packaged: 2017-11-06 19:44:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 38,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/422516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/pseuds/screamlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the failed debut of Loki as supreme ruler of all humans, the Avengers left on Earth piece themselves together using JARVIS, <i>The Sound of Music</i>, science, war games, and anything else they can find.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. bethesda

**Author's Note:**

> So the structure of this work is: a prologue, three main parts, an interlude, and an epilogue. The timelines of these parts overlap quite a bit; there's moments crossing over in each part to designate where they fit in to the overarching series of events, but it might not be immediately clear where a part belongs.
> 
> This story couldn't have come together without [waldorph](http://archiveofourown.org/users/waldorph) and [zlot](http://archiveofourown.org/users/zlot)'s amazing guidance/thorough as hell beta'ing and twitter's terrific use of peer pressure (looking at you, [lanyon](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lanyon) and [aliasssmith](http://archiveofourown.org/users/aliassmith) et al).

"Did it have to be Bethesda?" Tony sighs. "Too many feelings here, Thor, too many feelings."

"Every world in every realm has points where the flower of positive energy blooms strongest," Thor replies as he leads Loki across Terrace Drive. "This is the strongest in the area, and one of the strongest in the world. Also, it’s very pretty and the _hot dogs_ are particularly good. I have tried many in my short time here and I can say this with great conviction."

"Listening to you talk is like Shakespeare," Steve says with genuine awe. "You talk great. Loki, too, when he’s not… you know. Actually talking."

"Yes? What is it?" Thor asks as Loki tugs Thor’s sleeve for his attention.

Loki rolls his eyes with all the condescension of a 12-year-old Tony Stark and motions with his hands—first something like a wave, then a negation, then—

"Fireworks? Did you plant a bomb here?" Natasha asks as she goes for whatever deadly thing she’s concealed on her person today.

Loki narrows his eyes and looks down at his bound wrists, then back to Natasha, then back at his wrists, then _back_ to Natasha because he believes, still, that she’s an idiot. 

"We can still screw that muzzle into his jaw, Thor. Not too late to change your mind," she says. 

"Hold on, I still want to guess what he meant," Steve says. He’s so much cheerier than he should be about this guessing game the murderous would-be absolute ruler of Earth is playing with them right now. "Do the hand thing again. It’s not magic or anything, is it?"

Thor looks concerned for a second, but he’s intrigued by whatever Loki is miming, too.

Now everyone looks, so Loki does the hand signals one more time. First he makes his hand move in the instantly recognizable sign for "wave", and then he shakes his hands to mean "no", and then the final signal: he puts his fists together to create a round shape, then slowly makes his fingers extend and bloom—

"Energy _flows_ , not flowers," Bruce realizes, clapping his hands together as everyone says _ohhhhhh_. Loki points and nods, then gives his brother a look that could wither the park around them.

Thor is looking at the sky, thinking back to some Asgardian science class, clearly, and then says, "Yes… that would make more sense. I was never one for the spiritual mechanics—science, as you call it—of our realm."

Loki closes his eyes and exhales sharply; as he does so, Tony smiles to himself. It seems a lot of things translate from galaxy to galaxy, realm to realm, planet to planet, and the exasperation at being the smartest person among a bunch of idiots translates perfectly (even if, at the moment, that’s not _exactly_ true for Loki). 

"The _flow_ ," Thor says, correcting himself with a wide, proud grin to Bruce, "Shifts, my friends, and we must return to Asgard. Farewell, all of you; may we meet in better circumstances. I will bring the art of shawarma to my people."

"I might literally fucking cry right now," Clint says, his voice dry and rough like sand.

Thor gives them all a final nod, Loki grabs onto the handle of the tesseract’s traveling container, and the brothers disappear in a pulse of blue light that has them all take a step back—just in case, because one step will protect them from the potential havoc it doesn’t wreak on them, right?

"Thor is gonna go down in Asgardian history for bringing shawarma to them. Seriously. _Shawarma_. How did I go this long without it? How am I gonna live without it ever again?" Tony asks. "Let’s get together there next Thursday, huh? Then you all can come over to the tower, catch up on some _Mad Men_ —"

"Training exercises," Natasha says as she glances to Clint. "We won’t be around for a while."

“You’re not getting any leave?" Steve asks. "I mean, we _have_ just—"

"We like staying occupied," Clint says, closing the door on their part of the conversation. In case it’s not clear, though, he crosses his arms over his chest and sets his jaw again.

"If you need to get in touch with us, go through SHIELD," Natasha says. She gives them a nod and touches Clint’s elbow, feather-light, and he turns on a dime to head back towards the car.

"Their next handler better be a secluded forest and a case of tequila," Bruce says when they’re 30 feet away and actually in their car with the windows rolled up. Just in case, he also mutters it because they’re _spies_ and Natasha probably planted four bugs on each of them while they stood there.

"And then they can upgrade to LMD Coulson 2.0," Tony adds. "Then they’ll live happily and murderously ever after."

"Oh good, you guys think Coulson’s still alive, too," Steve says with a sigh of relief. "I didn’t know when would be a good time to tell Fury that their synthetic blood needs a lot of work if it’s gonna convince anyone. Guess I should be glad he didn’t actually rub a bunch of cards on a dead man, though."

"Yeah, way to taint— _literally taint_ —a hundred years of progress against germ contamination and—” Bruce stops and then turns to Tony, elbowing him as he asks, “Wait, you think Coulson was a droid?"

"Now that I’ve gotten over my thunderous grief: nah, not really, he was pretty human,” Tony replies. "But that’s because I think a Stark-model android would have better taste than _Supernanny_. Also, more hair. Coulson’ll be back, probably a little balder and with a couple new Dolce suits courtesy of our tax dollars, and then he and all his spies can live polyamorously ever after."

"That sounds kinda nice, actually," Steve says.

"Big softie," Tony laughs, lightly hitting Steve’s bicep. "Where you headed?"

"I might take a road trip,” Steve answers. “Got nowhere to be, so I thought I’d travel a little."

"On that thing?" Tony asks as he looks over the rim of his sunglasses at Steve’s bike. "Yeah, it’s a nice bike, but I’ve got jets sitting at JFK if you ever want to get somewhere without being murdered by drifters or at the Bates Motel."

"Thanks for the offer," Steve says. "I… well. If you guys wanna meet up, catch a ball game or something—"

"What, we’ll send you a telegram? Leave word with your landlady? No way. Here, take one of these," Tony says as he digs into the inner pocket of his suit for a thin, red mobile phone and a small bundle of cords. "Our assassin friends have already had this latest in Stark mobile technology smuggled into their camping gear by our trusted Dr. Banner—"

Bruce beams at Tony, so proud of his stealth right now.

"It’s got an extra battery pack already attached so you’re good for a few days without charging. I also loaded it with the best music from those seven decades you napped through."

"Billy Joel’s "We Didn’t Start the Fire" is a history lesson as well as really catchy," Bruce adds. "So’s the whole Bob Dylan discography. It’ll probably take a while to understand what he’s saying, but you’ll catch on."

"Gee, guys… thanks?" Steve looks at the phone in his hand with more suspicion than he did the tesseract, but he does pocket it and give Tony and Bruce a smile. "How about you guys? What’ll you do? I bet you’ve got all kinds of important stuff to work on—one of the SHIELD interns said something about _global warming_? Is that a thing that’s happened? Are you gonna fix it?"

"Oh, wow," Tony says.

"Yeah, don’t," Bruce says with a quick touch to Tony’s arm before he answers Steve. "Tony’s generously given me my own lab in Stark Tower that I’m free to destroy, so I’m gonna take the time to answer a question I haven’t really thought about except ten or fifteen times a day: _am I sterile_?"

"I mean, it’s a valid question," Tony says. "Frankly, I’m curious. Imagine if he put a baby in me. How cool would that be?"

Steve stares. To his credit, he doesn’t seem disappointed or disgusted; rather, he stares and nods because what else can he do?

Bruce cuts him a break and says, a little more genuine, “SHIELD’s paying me to research the big guy and my body, our tenuous connection, since I haven’t really had access to a proper lab since it happened. I don’t know why that other thing was the first thing I said.”

“It happens,” Steve says. “Don’t put a baby in Tony.”

"And I,” Tony says because he hasn’t said anything for about 15 seconds, “Have got to make a couple of million dollars of repairs to Stark Tower because, well, you know—"

"It was the place to be that time the world almost ended," Steve says.

"Grand slam, Cap," Tony replies. "Have fun on the trip, huh? Don’t forget us when we’re finally out of your hair and you can breathe that sweet polluted air we’ve inherited from your peers."

Steve shakes Tony’s hand, smiles, and says, "Tony, don’t change, okay?"

Tony tightens his grip on Steve’s hand, but he’s pretty sure that doesn’t begin to convey what he’s feeling: the pure astonishment of hearing something out of someone’s mouth that he has never, ever heard before. It’s happened a lot lately, but in the course of his life, not nearly often enough. So Tony grips Steve’s hand tight for a few seconds longer than he should before he climbs into his car.

"Now," Bruce says after he, too, gets a genuine Captain America Farewell Handshake(TM) and climbs into the passenger seat of Tony’s car. "Where are you taking me? Back to the tower? It’s still early. I could eat."

“Then let’s eat,” Tony agrees. “And then: SCIENCE.”

“To science! For science! Whatever! Science!” Tony glances over for a second to watch Bruce laugh because he kind of loves it, the way he laughs with his whole diaphragm, with his whole chest and body, throwing his head back and basking in it like it’s the best feeling in the world. Maybe every laugh is precious to their Dr. Banner—lucky for him, he’s stuck with Tony for a while and Tony’s the funniest person any of them know.

“What?” Bruce asks, and maybe Tony stared for a second too long.

“What, nothing,” Tony stammers. “JARVIS, call Pepper, maybe she wants to meet us.”

This isn’t anything new, Tony thinks as he puts the car in drive. He’s wearing an expensive suit, driving one of his beautiful cars, heading to lunch before he spends the rest of the day in his new pet project, designing and planning and _doing stuff_ , stuff he loves. It feels different, though.

“Hi,” Pepper says. “Where are you? Did you drop off your _Norse gods_ already? I thought it’d take longer, shipping them off to their _realm_.”

“I got this,” Bruce says as he plucks the phone out of the dashboard. “Hey, it’s Bruce. Operation Get That Killer Cube Off The Planet is complete, so we’re going to lunch. Can we pick you up? I think I can pack myself into the glove compartment or one of Tony’s pockets so you have room to sit.”

There’s a stop sign and Tony turns his head so he can watch Bruce banter on the phone and this, he thinks, this is the difference. SHIELD and this _disaster_ turned on a particle accelerator in that Helicarrier lab with him and Bruce—suddenly, there was a new element and Tony has to find a way of storing it, keeping it, before it disappears.


	2. if he only had a brain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony’s so much better at handling disasters than his own life.

A few days after Bruce has settled into a kind of routine in his new fancy New York life, he’s going over some figures in his lab at Stark Tower when JARVIS makes his presence known. Bruce honestly thought he’d find it creepier to have the voice and personality of Tony’s childhood butler (with a pinch of _Blackadder_ and other dry British TV shows thrown into the mix, he thinks) constantly over his shoulder, but JARVIS is actually helpful. 

Most of the time.

"Dr. Banner," JARVIS announces. "It is currently 2 PM Eastern Standard Time. I feel it my duty to remind you that the human body’s energy reserves require regular replenishing. In America, these are colloquially referred to as _meals_ , and my records suggest you have yet to have one today. Might I suggest a break from the lab for 30-45 minutes? To ensure you undertake—"

"Hold on a second, Jar," Bruce says as he carefully transfers a solution between beakers.

"I suggest referring to me as JARVIS to guarantee my complete comprehension of your requests," JARVIS replies.

"Whatever," Bruce says. "Can I turn off mother hen mode and get back to work? Did Pepper put you up to this?"

"As you may know, Ms. Potts departed for a business trip 28 hours ago. She has no impact on my programming. I suggest you speak to Mr. Stark, should you have questions regarding my user interface and functionality. Additionally, I can offer you a brief survey in order to improve—"

"Oh my God," Bruce moans. He’s getting agitated but his hands keep steady as he sets some tubes in the industrial sink. "I’ll talk to Tony. Thanks, JARVIS. And I’ll get lunch when I’m ready."

"Very good, sir. If you haven’t eaten in 15 minutes, I will remind you again at that time."

"Are you _kidding me_? No. Turn off reminder. Cancel. Delete event. Shut up, Siri, I don’t want to dance!"

"Please note that I have been programmed to ignore all requests framed by the term _Siri_ , as Mr. Stark believes—"

Bruce leaves the lab and slams the glass door as hard as he can because _goddammit_ , as if Tony himself wasn’t irritating enough, his AI has Bruce’s pulse racing and he needs to get out of this building and outside into whatever passes for fresh air in this hellhole called Manhattan.

*

Bruce eats lunch at an outdoor cafe a few blocks from Stark Tower. He sticks around for an hour, maybe more, valiantly pretending to read one of the novels he shoved into his messenger bag when he left the mansion that morning, but he keeps replaying the conversation he had with JARVIS, analyzing its implications and why it’s so _upsetting_ to him. 

Wait. "Conversation"? Interaction? He’s not sure how many levels of ethics he needs to address when thinking about the role sentient-seeming JARVIS plays in the everyday operations of life with Tony Stark, and whether he should blame JARVIS or his dickhead creator.

Oh, definitely the dickhead creator.

Times like these, when he feels anger surging through his body and knows that riding that could lead to destruction here in Midtown in broad daylight, he takes a few moments for himself. Bruce closes his eyes, rests one of his hands on a flat surface and lets his hand relax into a loose splay. It’s simple, but it helps if he visualizes his nerves relaxing, loosening like his hand, resting flat and unconcerned. He’ll calm down and then he’ll be ready to get back to work.

Or he’ll go back to Stark Tower and murder Tony with his bare Bruce Banner hands. Maybe he’ll beat Tony to death with this ugly-as-sin mobile phone that is _never_ going to sell when it takes three doctorate degrees to learn to operate—poor _Steve_ , wherever he is.

He sighs again and eats some more, irrationally hoping JARVIS hears every bite as a silent _fuck you_.

*

Tony looks up when Bruce lets himself into his lab and offers a little wave. "Finally took that lunch break, huh? JARVIS wouldn’t stop bugging me about it."

"JARVIS was telling you I hadn’t eaten yet?" Bruce asks. Tony looks up at Bruce’s short, dry little laugh that isn’t a laugh at all, if a laugh by definition shows good-humored emotion, which he thinks it does, it might, maybe. "Well, yeah, tell him I did."

"He already knows," Tony replies. "I added you as a resident of the Stark properties so he monitors your caloric intake. Five hundred calories every six hours gets him off your back."

"That’s so helpful of you," Bruce says.

"You’re welcome."

"Turn it the fuck off."

Tony turns around and looks at Bruce again through the holographic projections surrounding him in the center of the lab. "Turn off _JARVIS_? Yeah, no."

"Remove me as a resident then, Tony, because I don’t want your robo-butler breathing down my neck, reminding me when to eat, shit, and exercise."

"I can change your status to guest, but you’re getting a lot of benefits that you don’t even think twice about as a resident," Tony warns him. "Like all doors are open to you. Literally, all doors. No access codes, not to this lab, your lab, any of the R&D labs around us, supply rooms—"

"I don’t _care_ about that, Tony. Do you honestly think typing in a few codes here and there is so fucking irritating to me that I’d sign over my whole life for JARVIS to run?"

Tony chews on the inside of his lower lip and looks back to the projections around him. Bruce doesn’t say anything, not until Tony finally answers, "Well, _I did_ , so."

"Jesus, you’re worse than Facebook."

"Uh, _better_ than those guys, I think you’ll find, because I actually—"

"What else are you collecting on me?" Bruce asks as he takes a few more steps into the lab. "Keeping track of my heart rate? Brain chemical levels? Are you just running scans on me constantly while I’m working?"

Tony’s thankful Bruce included the _while I’m working_ clause in his sentence because if he hadn’t, well, Tony has a hard time being dishonest and he thinks reminding Bruce that JARVIS is a full-time AI, always running at full power and working on things for him, would probably be a misstep at this point in the conversation.

"Look, that’s just a safety precaution. You can’t fault me for that."

Bruce’s eyes, though, and the thin line of his mouth, suggest to Tony that he does anyway.

"I know," Tony begins, " _I know_ that, ideally, if you had to be around people again then you’d come here or to a SHIELD lab or your old lab at Culver, and you’d just be Bruce Banner again. No one would bother you, you could come and go as you please, work on what you want, and this? What I’m offering you? It’s the closest you’re gonna get to that, okay?" Tony watches Bruce’s face for changes in his expression, thinks the downturn of his mouth suggests something that’s not anger so that’s good, right? "You know what I’m going to say."

"I’m not _just_ Bruce Banner anymore," Bruce replies. "Yeah, I picked up on that a few years ago. Weird how it just _happened_ all of a sudden but it did."

Tony, because he needs something in his hands at all times, something to be working on or worrying at, hooks a finger through one of the belt loops of his jeans and scratches at the denim, still watching Bruce. Bruce seems okay. Why wouldn’t they be? They’re both scientists. They’re both _amazing_ scientists. They’re both scientists and not just that, but they’re whip-fast and sharp, and not just the sum of their intelligence and training. They’re both amazing, everyone says so. This shouldn’t be a problem because _the work_ is the most important thing for them.

Isn’t it?

Bruce pulls up a stool and looks like any other mild-mannered professor, except for the smirk at the corner of his mouth that Tony’s noticing is always there, always, always, always. God, he’s so fucking wry, ten thousand times more aware of his surroundings than Tony ever will be in or out of the suit. Tony has the feeling this is a pre-existing condition for Bruce Banner, whose glances see further into people than Hawkeye’s better-than-perfect vision, whose jabs go deeper than Black Widow’s, whose carefully controlled breaths pacing his righteous fury are more punctuated and so much more informed than Captain America’s, who has a better idea of how to rule and how to smash than Thor ever could.

Okay, maybe he’s not _all_ of that, but Bruce Banner as an incendiary device isn’t a match for Iron Man, that’s for sure.

"Know what’s so interesting, every time I come back to the states?" Bruce asks.

"Where have you been, exactly?" Tony asks. He’s not deflecting, he’s curious, genuinely curious, because for all that JARVIS monitors Bruce, Tony still knows so little about him and that needs to change. At this hint of history, his heart pounds faster because he’s so close to knowing, maybe even understanding this puzzle in front of him. "I heard about Rio and Calcutta. Where else does Bruce hide from the world?"

"Everywhere in between," Bruce replies. He smiles, slow and not easy, not a bit, and there’s so much Tony wants. "And I don’t hide; I withdraw."

"That’s a world of difference right there," Tony says, injecting as much sarcasm as he can manage.

That doesn’t make a difference to Bruce, who raises his eyebrows and says, "Yeah, there is. Here’s what I hate about America, Tony, and you’re more American than Captain fucking America, so you’ll appreciate it." Bruce considers what he said for a second and amends that. "Or you’re so far up your iron ass that you’ll never notice."

"Try me," Tony replies. He’s still worrying incessantly at the denim of his belt loop, he can’t help it. He’s getting agitated now, not that it makes a difference or anything, not that _his_ heart rate jumping leaps and bounds will destroy everything around them—actually, it might, he thinks as he remembers a few awful nights he had at MIT in what’s now known as Stark Hall after a few too many get-trashed-do-science nights he had as a teenaged undergrad. 

"We’re goddamn locusts," Bruce says. Tony would swear, swear on Pepper, in front of Pepper, by Pepper, that Bruce’s voice sounded thick then, like it’s was a real effort to say that. Why? Why was that difficult? Tony wants to know, so he stays quiet and then maybe Bruce will tell him! _Oh hey funny how that works_ , listening and being quiet! "All of us consume until we can’t _move_ , we’re so stuffed with shit we think we need, so what’s left? What’s the ultimate product?"

Tony scoffs and he thinks he did it under his breath so Bruce couldn’t hear, but that’s not the case if he’s to judge based on Bruce’s hard look towards him.

"Is it _man_ , Bruce?” Tony asks, because he doesn’t hide or back away, not from anything, so he might as well fly into the face of whatever this thing is. “So surprised, really, that never occurred to me before. Is this a hint that you want to go on one of those safaris where everyone gets to hunt people? Those actually exist, by the way. They’re not my thing, but I’ve got a brochure somewhere if you’re really… _game_."

Oh, come on, Tony thinks, that was so ridiculous—where’s the laugh he deserves? Bruce stares at him, head tilted, and he’s not angry anymore, Tony can see that much. He’s baffled, really, baffled, like Tony just told him that two plus two is four when Bruce had thought it was five and what kind of genius would he be if that was the case?

"And here I thought that you’d get that, better than anyone else," Bruce says. "People acting like they’re entitled to own any part of you."

"Oh _that’s_ what you mean," Tony says, tapping his chin as he looks so very deep in thought. "I thought you were dancing around some new revelation, like one I hadn’t realized on my own when I was a 14-year-old freshman at MIT."

"So you understand what I mean," Bruce begins, "And then you said, Fuck it, I’m gonna track him anyway because Manhattan is my personal nature preserve—"

"Jeez, all this because my fancy alarm clock reminded you to have a sandwich?"

"Oh, Tony," Bruce laughs—charming, adorable, fun-loving Bruce from the sports car gone, all of a sudden—"You have no idea."

Tony swallows, hard, because he thinks this might be fear. His heart’s racing, pounding loud in his ears, his mouth drying, and he can’t take his eyes off Bruce. They stare at each other for a few seconds until Bruce softens a little and Tony can straighten up and roll his neck and shoulders, more joints popping than he’d like to hear. Then again, he hasn’t been this tense since that time he blasted into a inter-galactic portal and almost didn’t come back, and that was like _an entire week ago_ , so he’s probably due for some punishing awkwardness.

"Here’s the thing—yeah, _I get that_ ," Tony says, in charge again because he hasn’t been a weapons manufacturer for four years and change but that doesn’t mean anything, not when his greatest weapon is finding other people’s weaknesses and exploiting them for all they’re worth.

The weaknesses, not the people. There’s a difference, right?

"I’m not Big Brother—no, shut up, I’m not. I’m _a_ big brother, no capitals. I’m an individual with private wealth and resources, and I want you to live here. I want you to use my resources and do something that’ll be helpful for you in the long run." Tony watches Bruce and it’s Bruce’s turn for his breathing to quicken under his too-big shirt and he’s getting a little sweaty and shiny around the cheeks and just under his eyes. "However."

Bruce doesn’t have to say it aloud; his eyebrows and the creases in his forehead so clearly form themselves into the word _HOWEVER._

"Other people work in Stark Tower," Tony says. "You haven’t seen them yet, have you? The cleaning people, cafeteria people, scared little interns who don’t have clearance up here, Pepper’s battalion of assistants, consultants galore who have to look at this post-Loki mess of a building and that mess of a redesign I’ve made and make them work. Do you get what I’m saying? If you want to be here, you have to play by my rules, and those are my pretty reasonable rules, Bruce. They need to know that I’m looking out for them. I thought you understood that."

"I do understand that, I do," Bruce says. He’s quiet again, thoughtful, and then he stands up from the tall stool he’s been on for way too long. Tony straightens up and so does Bruce, so they can look each other like it’s the last time and _why would he think that_? "I know what you mean," Bruce says again. "So I hope you understand why I have to leave."

Bruce gives him the courtesy of a moment’s shock and then leaves the lab. Tony thinks he’s reluctant about it, maybe even sad. He thinks that, but he doesn’t know. He hopes.

*

"Pepper Pepper Pepper Pepper I think I drove Bruce away help help _Pepper_ ," Tony chants into his phone. 

Tony listens to Pepper move away from her phone and call out, “Thirty hours, Happy! Pay up. Cash. It’s not worth deducting from your paycheck."

"Really? Betting against your boss, boyfriend, _and_ best friend? You have such little faith in me?"

"You’re just mad that your big nerd crush on Bruce made you think the honeymoon would last three whole days without me as a buffer."

"All right, I had three days, what’d Happy say?"

“Thirty-six hours, but I said thirty on the nose."

"Because you’re a genius, I know, okay, but Pepper, listen, I really did drive Bruce away. I’m still in my lab and I think he’s still in his lab and I don’t want to go and see if he’s packed his sad little life into his sad little bag and left already because—"

"Tell me what happened."

"Pep, it was stupid, he’s an idiot, okay. He didn’t like JARVIS being all up in his grille. Is that something people still say? I don’t know how that idiom can be updated. We still have cars, cars still have grilles, people still hit animals on highways and get their little bodies twisted up in the grille. That’s where the idiom came from, right? Okay hold on I’m gonna look that up—”

"Tony."

"Pepper. PEPPER."

"Tony. Give Bruce the opportunity to shut JARVIS off when he’s alone in his lab and when he’s in the house. Not everyone is me, Happy, and Rhodey, okay, and JARVIS can seem a little invasive if—"

"Okay but he’s like, really offended that we’re tracking him due to his hulkness being kind of a massive insurance liability, _dear_ , and I don’t know how to break it to him that America is still the most litigious place on Earth. I could be much worse, you know? Pepper, off the top of your head, do you know which of our lawyers we can use as a patsy and maybe Bruce can eat him? I know Bruce isn’t a cannibal but his mouth is full of _secrets_ and you don’t have proof he’s—"

"Tony. Tell him you’ll give him the option of shutting off JARVIS when he needs to be alone, but that you need to track him when he’s around other people."

"You think that’ll work?"

"I think if you two want to stay together, literally in the same building—if you want him to use your facilities and stay in your home—this is the very least you need from him, Tony."

“I—” Tony sighs, rubs his eyes. He wishes Pepper was here, right here in front of him, because he hates saying this to a _phone_ and they could turn this into a video call but he’s too—maybe that’s a bad idea and anyway it’s not the same as _Pepper_ _being here_. He wants his arms around her and he wants to mutter all his thoughts into the crook of her neck where no one can hear him and laugh at him, but that’s not an option right now, is it, since _Bruce is leaving_.

”Is this what you felt?” Tony asks. This is why he hates phones; he ends up flying blind into an emotional situation and then he starts babbling and can’t stop because he can’t see the other person’s sheer _panic_ at being bombarded like this. “When I used to—look, he’d rather run back to _Calcutta_ —no, he’d rather cut himself off from us and from _life_ than do this one kind of unpleasant thing! And what if I go in there, what if I walk in and tell him what you told me, explain the only thing he has to give so he can stay with us, and he leaves anyway?”

“Tony,” Pepper says. He hears it in her voice, he swear he does: she wishes she was here, too. “All you can do is try. It’s a cliche, but it’s true. You’re not afraid of trying _anything_ , so you have to try this.”

“All I can do is work on JARVIS becoming sentient. Then _he_ can be Tony Stark and everyone’s gonna love him way more, believe me, JARVIS will be—”

“We’ve talked about this: you are _not_ becoming a cyborg or so help me—”

“I mean, technically, I’m already partially cybernetic since the reactor—”

“Bruce?”

“Right, shit, Bruce,” he yelps. 

Tony runs out of his lab and uses the FIND BRUCE function on JARVIS for the first and last time, babbling to Pepper the entire time about the pros and cons of her future cyborg husband, Jarvis Anthony Stark, whose charms she won’t be able to resist.

In a promising show of uncreativity, Bruce is reading at one of the tables in his own lab. "Couldn’t concentrate," he says, a little sheepish when Tony storms in, phone still attached to his hand and ear. "How about you? Is that Pepper on the line? Hi, Pepper."

"Hi Bruce! I’m sorry Tony’s an idiot!" she calls out so faintly that Tony’s pretty sure Bruce didn’t hear.

"Um, so, don’t go," Tony says as he approaches the lab table too quick. "Please." He rests the phone on the table, face up as he puts Pepper on speaker, and leans all his weight against the table. He thinks this is something he got from his mom—his dad would convey how serious he was by sharpening his tone and raising his voice, but his mom would get in closer, touch his cheek, his hair, his shoulders, his arms, and look him right in the eye. Maria’s eyes would dig a hook into you and you’d go when she was ready to let you go, not a moment sooner.

He shouldn’t be thinking about his parents, not now, not when Bruce is looking at him like this. Not when he’s wetting his lips, looking at Tony’s mouth, meeting his eyes, sweating again, God. He almost looks hopeful, or that’s Tony projecting so hard he’s _literally_ projecting onto Bruce’s face. Bruce flips his book over on its front to mark his place and rests both his hands on the table, too, mirroring Tony, their hands centimeters apart. 

"Please don’t leave. I’ll update JARVIS. Pepper has good ideas because she’s a human, like you are, who doesn’t need a machine to micromanage her life. I do, though, and privacy—what’s _that_? I genuinely have no idea on most days.” Tony has to take a breath and re-grip the table, dig in his barely-there nails, lean in a little closer, get everything out before, who knows, before the world explodes or something. That could happen, maybe they’d be better off, frankly. He’s so much better at handling disasters than his own life.

"I’ll work all night and have a whole new configuration, a whole new profile, set up for you, and I’ll customize it for you. We’ll do it together. It’ll go live first thing in the morning, my top priority. So please don’t leave until you see it. Please." Tony swallows hard and adds, "Ask Pepper to be sure, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never begged anyone this much for anything, ever. Definitely not this much just to stay the night, and you don’t even have to stay in the same bed with me, so that’s an extra win."

"Tony," Pepper interrupts, "If this crisis has been averted, I’ll hang up, okay?"

“Thanks, Pepper,” Tony says without looking down at the phone. 

"Thanks, Pepper," Bruce repeats. His eyes don’t drop, not for a second.

"I’m sure you’ll figure this out," Pepper adds, "But when talking to Tony, it helps if you use small words and show your work."

"I’ll do my best," Bruce says.

Three soft tones sound out of the phone’s speaker, but it could have been a three-headed dog and they probably wouldn’t have noticed for all that Tony and Bruce are listening to anything outside of their tiny enclosed space.

"I really miss New York Chinese food," Bruce says.

"How do you feel about working through dinner and not making conversation?" Tony asks.

"Sounds like home to me."

"I’ll have to hand code a lot, like, on a computer with a keyboard because JARVIS can’t actually operate on himself so I’ll have to go in and do it," Tony explains. "So you should join me and sit on the couch with your laptop and answer pretty much every single question out of my mouth because I’m a mess without him to fact check my life."

"Nah. I’m not gonna do that," Bruce says. Tony looks down because he’s pretty sure, now he’s definitely sure, now he’s _SURE_ that Bruce Banner’s fingers are resting on his, yet Bruce’s eyes are still locked on Tony’s face and Tony’s pretty sure he’s turning redder than red for unrelated-to-Pepper-and-yet-related-to-sex-and-crushes-and-stuff reasons. "You’re gonna sit there and work, I’ll work, and if you have questions like what was that episode of _Moonlighting_ where this thing happened, you’ll have to remember it yourself."

Tony grips Bruce’s fingers tight, rests his hands on top of Bruce’s, grips him around the wrists, and watches Bruce become alarmed for a second before he tries, really tries his best, to relax into this touch. Bruce isn’t—he doesn’t—Tony lets go and just rests his hands on Bruce’s, letting himself be a weight on them. Bruce’s breathing is different, slightly off, and God, does Tony fucking know that look. It’s called _so you’re the 21-year-old CEO of your family business, the largest weapons manufacturer in the world, and this only happened because your parents just died and you wake up every morning completely alone. When’s the last time someone touched you, Tony, without expecting something out of it?_ Tony hasn’t been that kid for a while, but—shit, Bruce has.

Tony smiles, shakes his head, trying to shake the memories out because that’s how a brain works, and remembers what Bruce said. "But my brain is full of science, and JARVIS and the internet is where I keep all the crap," Tony whines.

Bruce smiles like he doesn’t give a fuck. He pulls his hands away from Tony’s (and Tony doesn’t hold on for a second, no, doesn’t stop his hands from following Bruce’s, doesn’t hold his hands a few inches above the table because he doesn’t know what to do with them until they dig into his pockets and start collecting lint along the seams). 

"Are you gonna take me off JARVIS’s watch list for the rest of the day and night?" Bruce asks.

Tony swallows and says, "I can at the house, but not here."

"I’m gonna go explore, then. See you back at the house. Six or seven?"

"Tomorrow, though," Tony warns as Bruce picks up his book again. "Tomorrow you’re back here, working on stuff, sciencey stuff, and it’ll be great, okay?"

Bruce smiles, neither yes or no, just a smile—his mouth is full of _secrets_ , Tony thinks to himself as he slips his phone back into his pocket and leaves, and he wants to know as many as he can.

*

Six hours in front of the giant TV at the Stark Mansion, JARVIS-less, the coffee table covered in a truly heroic number of take-out cartons. Bruce does as promised: he works online, but doesn’t satisfy any of Tony’s demands for instant knowledge gratification, and then he _puts the laptop aside_ and _reads a book_. Like, _a book_ that has _pages_ made of _paper_. Tony glances over and shudders a little, that musty paper smell totally killing his coding boner.

"What are you even reading?"

" _Hunk of Metal: The Tony Stark Story_ ," Bruce answers.

"Uh, excuse you, I won that lawsuit. It should say _The UNAUTHORIZED Tony Stark Story_ ," Tony replies.

"I bought this copy in Venezuela," Bruce replies. "Please don’t sue Venezuela."

"Well, not tonight I won’t," Tony mutters.

*

It’s 5 AM and JARVIS is up and running, though Tony and Bruce have collapsed into the couch. The sky’s beginning to lighten outside and brighten the TV room where they sat all night. 

"So Pepper doesn’t mind JARVIS all up in her business?” Bruce asks. “Or your other friends, uh, with the weird names."

They’ve been nodding off for the past few hours, neither of them comfortable on the couch but neither of them wanting to cancel their impromptu sleepover, either, or move it to a bedroom. It’s gotten chilly in the TV room in this coldest part of the night, and Bruce looks around for anything resembling a blanket or a throw or whatever. He curls up into himself a little more, hides his feet in the side of the couch cushion, wishes he had a hat or something if Tony’s not even going to have—all right, it’s Tony, was Bruce honestly expecting him to have a blanket out here for anyone’s convenience? _Really_?

"What, Pepper?" Tony asks as he wakes up again. "What’d you say? Bruce? You awake?"

"Yeah," Bruce yawns. "I asked, why don’t your friends mind JARVIS? Why am I the only one who minds?"

Tony’s doing the same thing, Bruce notices as he rubs his eyes. Arms around his chest to warm up, toes in the couch, compacting himself. What a pair they are, he thinks. He doesn’t know what he means by that, but it’s an idea that warms him a little, that seems to belong right here next to Tony so close to dawn. What a _pair_ they are. He wants to latch onto it, physically, sink his teeth into it, but it’s just a phrase, just an idea. What a pair they are, he thinks, keeping the words, those very specific words, in the forefront of his mind.

"Rhodey’s a soldier so he’s used to having zero privacy,” Tony says as he rests his head against the back of the couch. "Happy loves JARVIS. Loves him. _Loves_ him. Loves JARVIS! Has way too much fun. And Pepper, I don’t know. She doesn’t use him for much."

"She doesn’t mind that he’s doing all that creepy qualitative recording pretty much all the time?"

"Dunno," Tony mumbles. "She knows I need him. She has nothing to hide from me. You’re different. I’ve spent half my life paying Pepper to be there for me, and JARVIS is what it means to be there for me. Also, she’s not like us."

"Hmm?"

"She’s a good planner. She’s the best planner. She’s got assistants to bring her a salad at 1 PM, a fruit salad at 3 PM, coffees on demand, she actually knows how to use Outlook, and I guess that’s better than a snotty disembodied voice based on my childhood butler reminding me to do it myself?"

"Jesus Christ, you had a butler," Bruce laughs. "I’m going to bed, Tony. You had a butler."

"So not related, maybe, I think." 

They get up from the couch and Bruce shuffles away, thinking of going to his room, only to have his cold hand grasped in Tony’s colder one and tugged in the direction of the master bedroom. He’s too curious to protest.

“Also,” Tony says as he gently shoves Bruce onto the bed and climbs in next to him. Bruce climbs right out again so he can take off his clothes and sleep in only his boxers. He thinks Tony’s fallen asleep, but then Tony shoots up, gets out of bed, and takes off his shirt and pants, stripping down to a tank and boxers.

“You always sleep with a shirt?” Bruce asks.

“Thing’s kinda bright, gets in my eyes,” Tony says. He burrows into the comforter again and steals most of it from Bruce before he asks, “What was I saying?”

“No idea,” Bruce laughs.

They’re facing each other and Tony’s trying to remember by staring into Bruce’s face, which works, somehow. “Why you mind JARVIS,” Tony realizes. “Working theory: you’re a good person.”

“I’m not,” Bruce laughs. “Not—no.”

“You wanted to leave me, leave _here_ , instead of posing even the slightest risk to the interns, the cleaning people, visitors, everyone. That’s—I don’t know how to calculate for that. So help me. Please. Please help me.”

Bruce closes his eyes, pulls the covers tighter, and opens his eyes again when Tony’s hand touches his cheek, his neck, his shoulder. He meets Tony halfway and kisses him, closes his eyes. Bruce thinks he mumbles something like _I’ll stay_. Whatever he says, Tony murmurs a _yes_ in return, kisses him again, and falls asleep.

*

It’s 7:45 and Bruce opens his eyes. The master bedroom faces the inner courtyard of the mansion so it’s all sunlight and green coming into the room. He looks up at the ceiling for a few seconds and then looks to Tony on his left, still asleep. He doesn’t snore; it’s more like a snort-purr, a rumbling somewhere in his chest, but it’s not too loud. He watches Tony’s face and falls asleep again.

*

It’s 9:14 and Bruce opens his eyes. Tony’s are half-opened, looking at him, and they’re both thinking the same thing: _say something bitchy, something ridiculous, to make this less—less whatever_. 

Bruce tips onto his Tony-facing side. It brings them closer together.

Both their hands slide up to cup each other’s jaws and they laugh, sort themselves out, their mouths meeting for a kiss that feels warm and tastes only a little stale since they keep waking up to talk. Bruce closes his eyes, kisses him again, is kissed again, moves his hand to Tony’s waist, hip, ass, ribs, back, touching and feeling all he can, pulling Tony’s leg over his hip, fitting their bodies together, pushing against each other. It’s slow, it’s still morning, and Tony keeps his flimsy tank top on for some reason, as hilarious as having an arc reactor bruise would be for Bruce.

It’s messy but nice, the way they just move against each other, not too heated, not too rushed, Tony on top of him, lifting Bruce’s leg a little too high because _shit, Pepper must be flexible_ , Tony’s tank top used to clean up their come and then thrown on the floor, which: good use of clothes, really.

Bruce thinks he’s nodding off again and rests his hand on Tony’s chest, nowhere near the arc reactor. Tony’s nodding off, too, and he takes Bruce’s fingers, holds them, and brings them up a little higher on his chest.

Bruce’s fingers worm out of the grasp and he taps his fingertips on the arc reactor’s surface. Tony laughs and takes them again when Bruce starts drumming his fingers on the reactor’s face, mumbling something about _that’s my—stop it, that’s annoying_ and it’s hilarious, like the funniest joke either of them have ever heard, Tony Stark finding someone else _annoying_ when he’s got to to be the reigning king of all that is irritating. 

This isn’t irritating, though.

Bruce stops tapping his fingers, rests his hand, relaxes it half over the reactor and half on Tony’s skin, his fingertips moving over Tony’s skin and chest hair, thinking comparing analyzing wondering marveling at the texture, faint scars here and there, old shrapnel marks on every inch. He focuses on the sensations, tries to keep his mind from conjuring things to be upset about. He feels Tony’s skin under his own and thinks for a dumb moment or two that this calm can last as long as they stay here.

Bruce closes his eyes, the anger coming back because he’s an idiot. Of _course_ he’d never get angry if he never did anything; if people were just static, amorphous, inanimate blobs, no one would ever want, do, or worry about anything. He’s a fucking idiot for lying here like he’s the first person to ever make this _brilliant_ discovery, Dr. Banner.

Tony runs a hand down his back, his other hand moving into Bruce’s hair and running through it gently, resting at the base of his neck, holding onto him rather than holding him down, and Bruce closes his eyes. Touch, touch, focus on touch, he thinks as he nods off again.

*

It’s 9:56 and Bruce opens his eyes. Tony’s typing on his phone and mumbling something like, _gonna tell Twitter I just had slow, mellow, awesome morning sex with the hulk and he IS incredible_. Then he actually says _lolololololol_ (el-oh-el-oh-el and his voice irritates Bruce when he’s using that _hurr hurr I’m so funny_ tone.) Bruce pinches his nipple and closes his eyes again once Tony seems satisfied with his imaginary Twitter presence.

*

It’s 11:04 and Bruce is on his side, facing the wall and not Tony. He looks over his shoulder and sees Tony has curled up tighter than ever, his head barely on any pillow but mostly against the mattress, his nose almost against Bruce’s back and ready to be broken and rolled on next time Bruce tossed or turned. Bruce turns around, pushes Tony onto his back, wakes him up a little, nudges him to the rest of the bed, and turns on his side to face Tony again. Tony throws an arm over his eyes and keeps sleeping, maybe. Bruce adjusts his grip on his pillow and looks Tony over, commits this to memory: long, black underarm hair, thin chest, more scars than he can count, the glowing reactor, sharp ribs, the sheets and comforter bunching at his waist like he’s a freshly-fucked movie star. He falls asleep again, thinks he can feel Tony’s ribs under his hand, his ribcage expanding and contracting like it does.

*

It’s noon and Tony opens his eyes. He looks and the rest of the bed is empty, his legs sprawled into the empty space. Pepper gets out of bed first and it always stings a little, probably from habit because he always made the point of being the first to leave. Here he is, though, left again, and he knows it’s because Bruce has shit he wants to do and probably thought loafing until nine was decadent enough, never mind _noon_ —he _gets it_ but he still wraps the sheets and comforter tighter around his body, covers his face from the sun.

He’s good for three seconds before he reaches an arm out for the nightstand, grabs his phone, and brings it into the blanket burrito with him. 

**_Bruce Banner:_ ** _Basement lab E021, working there. Bagels in kitchen._

**_Pepper Potts:_ ** _Not a problem, really. LGA tomorrow 3pm. Room for me and Happy at science prom?_

Well, shit, maybe there’s a reason to get out of bed after all. 

**_Tony Stark:_ ** _always always always. bruce has to catch up on so much reality tv. maybe coulson left a primer?! worth hacking shield y/y_

*

 **From:** secmsg@shield.int

 **To:** tony@stark.com, pepper@starkindustries.com

 **Subject:** COMMUNICATION FROM S.H.I.E.L.D. PERSONNEL

You have received a secure communication from S.H.I.E.L.D. Personnel (BARTON, C). Please access this message via the link below. You will require the login information provided for you by your S.H.I.E.L.D. contact.

This message was automatically generated. Please do not reply at this address.

\- - -

I’VE SMASHED YOUR LIMITED EDITION BULLSHIT “PHONE” AND THROWN THE PIECES INTO FOUR DIFFERENT RIVERS ON TWO DIFFERENT CONTINENTS. TRY TO SNEAK TECH ON US AGAIN AND YOU’LL SEE WHERE THEY WENT.

FISTS AND KISSES,

CB

*

 **From:** secmsg@shld.int

 **To:** rbbanner@gmail.com

 **Subject:** COMMUNICATION FROM S.H.I.E.L.D. PERSONNEL

You have received a secure communication from S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel (BARTON, C). Please access this message via the link below. You will require the login information provided for you by your S.H.I.E.L.D. contact.

This message was automatically generated. Please do not reply at this address.

\- - -

b-

seriously what are you doing

judging you

see you soon prob

cb

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FYI: a thousand thank-yous and a thousand more to my puntastic goddess **zlot** for contributing the title of Tony's biography: _Hunk of Metal_.


	3. the tongue-lashing of a lifetime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She's not ripping them to shreds because Bruce isn’t Pepper, and Pepper isn’t Bruce. She’d like to see any one person try to own all of Tony Stark.

"Another high altitude tip, Pep," Happy calls out from the front seat. "Go easy on those G&T's because apparently alcohol affects people harder up here at the top of the beanstalk than when we're at sea level.”

"Happy, are you browsing and driving?" Pepper asks from the backseat.

"Yes, I am. Are you lying down? Okay, 'cause you can't see that I'm going about 10 mph. Old ladies are about to start jogging up next to me and telling me to speed it up, sonny, I could hurt someone driving this slow."

"God, I hate Denver," Pepper moans. "I've never been here before, but I hate it so much. Everything's awful here."

"Tell me about it. This site suggests I run only six miles instead of ten, to which I say: _miles_? I'm not getting out of this car unless it's to get back on the plane and get the hell out of here. Nice try, Denver. You won't get me yet."

"That's the best idea anyone has ever had. Don't let me leave the car. Let's just stay in here and lie to Tony, tell him everything went great, and we'll siphon some of his Swiss money out.”

"He wouldn't even notice, would he?"

"Happy, I could literally become Tony Stark tomorrow and he'd probably give me a raise and call it the best idea I've ever had."

"You're always the one with the great ideas, you know that."

"I'm gonna close my eyes for a few, okay? I've got an alarm on my phone so I can wake up in time for the meeting, but we should be back at 10 Haha Stupid New Yorkers We're On A Fucking Mountain Drive in about 15 minutes."

"Noted. Power-nap away. I'm on the lookout."

Pepper's back to Executive Assistant to Tony Stark, CEO of Stark Industries, but she honestly gets more CEO things done as Tony's assistant than she did as CEO. God, that week and that ulcer were _not_ fun, not at all. She's still furious, honestly, at how that all played out: there she was, CEO for the company she knew inside and out, taking over for the man she knew better than anyone else in the world, the first female CEO of the largest weapons and technology manufacturer in the _world_ , and she was allowed to accomplish exactly zero things.The media did a pretty thorough and disgusting job of splitting coverage between Tony's mental breakdown and the fact of her vagina, whether the two ever intersected, how that affected her _feelings_ and therefore the operations of Stark Industries, _assholes_. 

She's in the backseat of the town car Happy is driving, curled up on her side, the high altitude doing a number on every nerve in her body. She can hear the bottles of water rolling around inside the "survival packs" that the flight attendants had distributed to her, Happy, and her assistant Ellie as they left the jet after landing. Ellie’s back at the hotel, getting ready for Pepper's presentation to some potential investors. Ellie isn’t high enough on the hierarchy to be driven around in Happy Hogan's Recovery Mobile, so tough luck for Ellie.

Pepper closes her eyes and she immediately sees the TV footage of the portal over Manhattan, Iron Man flying right up into it, and she has to open her eyes again. It still chills her, how close Tony came to dying in some cold vacuum of space none of them would ever see—she needs this trip. She needs to spend a few days away from him. She needs her own room for a few more days, to sprawl out in bed by herself, to not wake up clawing at the edges of the arc reactor because she needs to feel that he's there, that he's all right, that when she scratches his skin around the reactor's edges he'll wake up and say _ow jeez what are you DOING to me the giant hole in my chest isn't enough do you want one of your own is that it come on pep it's okay i'll drill a hole in you yeah baby oh come on that was funny if it's not funny at 3 AM then it'll never be funny i'm sorry i'm sorry pepper i'm sorry virginia there is an iron man okay i’m still here_ —

She wonders what Tony has said to Bruce about her, because Bruce seemed terrified to meet her and it took him roughly 15 minutes of awkward, probing dinner conversation before he warmed up to her. That was about 13 minutes too long for a scientist like Bruce Banner, who's just as brilliant as Tony but apparently less adept at social interactions than—yes, than Tony, who grew up with cameras in his face and tabloid profiles every few years, the golden boy of the future, all these people he is and isn't. 

Pepper wonders if she'll ever have to recalibrate her senses to function outside the Stark bubble. God, to hell with _that_. 

"Pep, your fifteen minutes are up," Happy calls from the front seat. "You think you could give up New York and Tony, marry me, and we'll move out here and be happy in the Rockies forever?"

"Only in our wildest nightmares, Happy," Pepper replies, smiling at him. She sits up, grabs their survival bags and passes one to Happy in the front seat. "There's your water and another healthy living in the mountains guide. Try not to get too comfortable up here. We need you to come back down and live between the East and Hudson Rivers as long as we're there, okay?"

"Rhodey thinks it'd be a good idea, too," Happy replies.

"I promise," Pepper says, leaning forward to peek through the partition again and rest her hand on Happy's shoulder. "One day, you, me, and Rhodey will take a Tony-free vacation up to some secluded cabin somewhere." 

Happy scoffs and says, "Yeah, and probably spend the entire trip thinking about what it'd be like if he were there. Then, surprise! Tony's followed us because we've all been secretly implanted with pet tracking microchips. Then he breaks down our cabin wall and everything's ruined."

"Yup, sounds like him," Pepper considers. "Meeting's over at 5:30, so come by for the reception and dinner. Ellie’s coming, too. I put her on phone duty."

"Oh god, what? Is she ready for that?” 

Pepper glares at him in the rearview mirror and he looks sheepish, as he should. Sometimes Happy forgets that he’s Happy, she’s Pepper, and she will take a very limited amount of shit from Tony but absolutely _none_ from Happy, especially when it’s in the form of him thinking he knows her staff the way she does. She loves him, but it rubs her the wrong way when _anyone_ makes cute, presumptuous comments about her decisions, harmless as they seem. They’re never harmless, and she never forgets. 

“I mean, what if Tony is honest to god blowing up Manhattan right now? What if he's literally riding the Hulk down Fifth Ave?"

"Ooh, kinky," Pepper says. "Reception, okay? It's not black tie."

"Get us lots of cash, boss. You know we're hurtin' for it."

Pepper smiles and slips on her shoes, checks her makeup and hair in the rearview mirror, and climbs out of the car. She can see Ellie waiting in the lobby, holding Pepper's business phone tightly in one hand and away from her body, as if that'll stop the constant calls and emails from coming through. Sweet kid. Wishful thinking. She’s not crying, though, which she counts as a plus for Ellie.

*

Pepper, Happy, and Ellie return to the reception after answering Tony’s third frantic call in the 30 hours she’s been gone. Pepper takes a moment to calm herself because his “crisis” turned out to be some fifth grade _my crush got mad at me and the world is going to END Pepper what do I DO_ nonsense that isn’t actually nonsense because HULK.

(To be fair, she's seen photos of Tony in the fifth grade customizing a robot monster Obie gave him to make it at least ten times more deadly than manufacturers intended, so clearly her fifth grade problems were a little different from Tony's fifth grade problems.)

Pre-crisis, Pepper had been talking to Maxwell Harper, one of the business owners she’s meeting in Denver to offer office space in the new clean energy Stark buildings scheduled to open in the next few years. They’re all gathered for some rich men’s circlejerk in the mountains and offered Stark Industries a presentation opportunity (on Tony’s dime), which Pepper accepted. She’s had a whole week to coordinate their position on the Avengers _thing_ and that’s mostly what these guys wanted to hear about, how it affects their plans for the other metropolitan locations.

No one’s genuinely interested in renting space at the Manhattan Stark Tower, so their questions about it are more out of pure, delicious, morbid curiosity, which doesn’t surprise Pepper in the least. The D.C., Atlanta, and Miami buildings, though, those are generating a lot of buzz, as is the very, very early plan for a Toronto building.

“So how many billions of dollars has Tony cost New York tonight?" Harper asks Pepper, who has to grin Joker-wide and fold her hands in front of her around her champagne flute, providing her with the opportunity to dig her nails into her hands and not his eye sockets. Harper was one of Tony's teachers at Andover before Harper left teaching and founded his own company. Their mutual hatred is the stuff of legend—at least, it is in Tony's mind. Pepper never quite believed him because it's Tony and teachers had to know what to expect, but these cute little jabs at Tony that have come up every few minutes since she walked in are beginning to annoy her enough that the embezzling thing she thought of in the car with Happy almost tempts her. 

"Well, he's _saved_ New York more energy than we can quantify right now with the reactor technology he installed at the tower, but collateral damage as a result of saving Manhattan? Nothing today, Dr. Harper," Pepper replies. "He did say hello, though, once I mentioned I was talking to you."

"Ha, that’s rich,” Harper laughs. "How all of you manage to stay with him—he’s lucky to have such a devoted following in you and Colonel Rhodes." He looks at Happy, gives him the up-and-down, and says, "And you, Mr. Hogan."

"Thank you," Happy says as he grabs a ludicrous amount of shrimp from a passing plate.

"Happy, there's Mos Def. You should go talk to him," Pepper says. "Ellie, too."

“What? That’s not his name any—“

"Happy," Pepper interrupts. 

Happy takes the hint and leaves to hang out with Ellie by the drinks and Pepper breathes a little easier. “So,” she says to Harper. “Can we talk about moving your company’s headquarters to our new building in D.C.? Tony _actively_ avoids going to D.C.—“

“Unless the Senate calls,” Harper remarks.

“Except when the Senate calls,” Pepper agrees. “The Senate only calls on Tony, though, not our office tenants, and you know taking a floor or two or five in the D.C. building is a nice way of supporting a valuable former pupil without actually having to talk to him.” Pepper smiles and adds, “Win-win.”

*

They stay for the after-dinner party so Pepper can continue mingling/working. Eventually, she and Ellie end up on the balcony of the hall, both of them in floor-length wool coats that the hotel provided for them to step outside because it's Denver and the temperature difference between day and night is ridiculous year-round, apparently. 

This is Ellie's third business trip with Pepper. Her former assistant (post-Natasha, pre-Ellie) left to pursue some career that wasn't Tony Stark Groupie and Ellie was the best of the discreet and efficient assistant army that's been working for them in New York for the past 18 months. She’s young, good at what she does, not tied down, and has no idea what kind of career trajectory she wants so Pepper will keep her close until Tony drives her away (directly or indirectly, because it’s always Tony, make no mistake).

This is about the time when someone like Ellie would take advantage of Pepper’s expertise and start some conversation, woman-to-woman, that wouldn’t be possible if they were at sea level while life as they know it bustled around them. She knows those awkward pauses and short answers, the ones that hint at someone thinking about something else entirely. Pepper, so rarely in the presence of someone who isn’t in the business of constantly making quips to fill the air, takes advantage of this moment. She listens to the Denver traffic below, the quiet conversation and chamber music within, the rumble of a plane nearby, her own slow breaths.

“New Google alert,” Ellie says. Pepper wasn’t expecting that. Hm. “Tony and Dr. Banner coming back from Whole Foods together. People actually paid for these photos. It’s kind of funny.” She offers Pepper her Stark-brand smartphone (StarkPhone sounds so _stupid_ , they need to work on that) and Pepper flips through the gallery.

“So domestic,” Pepper laughs.

“Should I send them the link?”

She thinks about it and decides against it. “Don’t. Dr. Banner prefers his privacy. Did they identify him in those photos?”

“They did.”

“Hmm. Don’t send them. If he finds them, he finds them, but we don’t have to shove them in his face.” She certainly doesn’t need to remind Bruce what it means to say “okay” to living and working with Tony Stark. He’s a smart man and she’s been gone for a day—he’s probably picked up on that by now. 

Pepper watches Ellie working on her phone, filing and tagging the link in the huge bookmarks application that they absolutely needed to create in order to keep Tony’s public life in line. She’s always pleasantly surprised when she doesn’t have to remind someone to do something, when she thinks someone excels at their job and they prove that her evaluation was correct. It’s nice when she’s right about something without having to fight about it. Or, more accurately, when someone comes over and takes the steaming hot plate of shit off her hands and knows exactly what to do with it. A gross metaphor, but Christ, even Tony at his most responsible still says and does some awful things that require ridiculous amounts of handling and damage control.

“Thank you for coming on this trip, Ellie,” Pepper says after a moment. “You’ve been an enormous help to me. I appreciate it.”

“Oh, not a problem. It’s been a lot of fun.”

“Adjusting to the altitude all right?”

“Yeah, it wasn’t bad. Drinking water really helps, like the kit says.”

Pepper smiles, but she’s jealous. She’s jealous that Ellie isn’t sick to her stomach right now, too, but jealousy’s a familiar feeling. She’s jealous of a lot and has been all her life. Yes, with everything and everyone she has in her life, it’s still not enough. Something/one might be taken from her and that curl of jealousy wraps itself around her stomach more often than not, keeping her constantly on guard. It’s small and petty and Tony teases her for it because it’s probably the one vice he’s never made time for, but it’s her vice and she guards it _because_ it’s hers and no one can take it away from her. This proprietary nature makes her excellent at what she does: protecting the Stark brand as personified by Tony Stark. Tony’s hers, she’s Tony’s, and they’ve stopped resisting the urge to change that in the year+ since they made the move from Malibu as a couple and as a company.

Her jealousy is reasonable, though. For example, she knows Tony has fallen for Bruce, fallen hard into a nerdy genius crush the likes of which he probably hasn’t had since he was a horny 15-year-old at MIT, and that’s probably going to end with them in bed together. 

(For all Tony’s loquacity, it’s only in bed, with his hands and his eyes and his whole body trying to understand, that he really manages to convey _anything_ resembling a genuine emotion.)

Anyway, that’s not something that has her swearing and ripping them to shreds because Bruce isn’t Pepper, and Pepper isn’t Bruce. 

She’d like to see any one person try to own _all_ of Tony Stark. She’ll be there when Tony needs her, like she has been all these years.

“Ellie, when we get back to New York,” Pepper begins. She looks Ellie over once more, looking for something she hasn’t seen before, maybe a secret drug problem or shopping addiction that could throw her slow-building plan off-kilter, but there’s nothing. She sees a sensibly dressed young woman ready to take orders from her. That’s good. That’s what she needs. She needs a woman, she needs _women_ near her because she can’t get anything done with men fretting about the imbalances of power inherent in their situation, her perceived feminine sensibilities, their egos, so much _bullshit_ that would ensure nothing would ever get done. It’s only men who think they can worm past Pepper and win Tony over as a buddy, like that’s what Tony needs. _Buddies_. 

“Ellie, would you be interested in training to be the head press liaison for our office?” Pepper asks. “Not Stark Industries, there are too many branches and offices for just _one_ person to handle all that insanity, but just for The Office of Tony Stark, CEO.”

Ellie looks impressed but also a little confused/terrified. She asks, “This isn’t… your job… is it…?”

“No, no,” Pepper laughs. “No one else can be Pepper Potts, Ellie. I’ve got that covered. You’d be the first contact for any breaking situations. It would be difficult, but you already have a taste for that kind of immediacy, don’t you?”

“Um, a little bit,” Ellie laughs. “You watch the guy with his name on the building flying up into an inter-galactic portal—yeah, I think I understand the sense of immediacy you’re talking about. It can only get less immediate from there, right?”

“Don’t worry, I’ve already assured Mr. Stark that if he tries that again, I’ll rescue him and murder him myself.”

“ _Murdering Tony Stark_ sounds like a great tell-all book, if you’re ever so inclined,” Ellie replies. “Could add it to a to-do list for you.”

Will she ever be near people who don’t insist on being so damn _hilarious_ all the time? She can’t keep up with this. She _hmph_ s a little, as much amusement as she wants to show right now. It’s getting late. She’s starting to need her own space again.

“Sounds like a good birthday present, actually,” Pepper says. Rhodey alone could write an entire volume on that Iron Man Senate hearing and the ensuing shitstorm. “I’m heading back to my room. Remember we have an early day in the exhibition hall tomorrow.”

“Of course,” Ellie says. “I’ll—“

“Good night, Ellie,” Pepper replies. She leaves the balcony and hands back the coat, waves away a glass of champagne. She closes her eyes for the shortest moment, takes a deep breath, and begins to make her rounds, saying goodbye to people.

*

It’s 7:32 AM MDT and Pepper looks away from her laptop at her phone. Her phone won’t stop buzzing because Tony had the genius idea of updating their mobile OS to include priorities (“High”, “Everest”, “MELTDOWN”) for text and media messages.

She opens Tony’s message and it’s a photo of Bruce in bed, shirtless (at least), asleep, his mouth open on Tony’s shoulder, and Tony in the foreground (also shirtless, hello, reactor) looking panicked, excited, worried, thrilled—somehow all at once. The text itself says:

 ** _Tony Stark:_** _IS THIS A PROBLEM? THIS MIGHT BE A PROBLEM. I LOVE YOU. IS THIS A PROBLEM? WE DID IT FOR SCIENCE AND ALSO BECAUSE LOOK IT’S A PROBLEM_.

Why does she ever let herself think for a moment that she’s not the smartest person at Stark Industries at any given time?

She saves the photo, saves the text, and replies, _No, it’s not a problem_. 

**_Tony Stark:_ ** _are you sure because you’re not using any extra hilarious punctuation or typography to suggest that you’re NOT clenching your jaw right now and calling the jet to pick you up from your hotel room and bring you home right now so you can kill us_

**_Pepper Potts:_ ** _First of all, you know that I keep the auto-capitalization feature on because you aren’t the only person I text. Secondly, I’m not mad._

**_Tony Stark:_ ** _you sure? because i don’t believe you. remember when you almost ripped out natasha’s jugular? natasha totally wanted to sleep with me. didn’t she? actually maybe not i think she and hawkeye have got a thing going with dead phil. maybe the cellist too. did i tell you this already?_

She types on her laptop, where there’s no chance she’ll accidentally send it to Tony: _NATASHA WAS DIFFERENT. YOU WERE KILLING YOURSELF WITH PALLADIUM AND ALCOHOL AND MORE PALLADIUM AND, GOD, EVEN MORE ALCOHOL THAN I THOUGHT WAS ACTUALLY FERMENTED IN THE FUCKING WORLD IN ANY GIVEN YEAR AND SHE FAILED TO TELL ME_ ** _ANY OF THAT_** _. SHE WASN’T DOING HER JOB AND WHEN PEOPLE WHO WORK FOR ME DON’T DO WHAT I TELL THEM THEN I_ ** _DO_** _RIP OUT THEIR JUGULARS. YOU AND RHODEY BLEW UP THE HOUSE IN MALIBU. YOU BLEW OUT THE GLASS WINDOWS AND SENT THE SHARDS INTO THE OCEAN WHERE THEY KILLED A LOT OF SEA LIFE. YOU ALMOST KILLED YOUR PARTY GUESTS, WHO COLLECTIVELY HAD THE IQ OF A TURKEY BEFORE YOU PLOWED THEM WITH EVERCLEAR MARTINIS, YOU MORON._

All right, she won’t send that. She had to type that all out, though, because it wasn’t enough to scream it at Tony when that all actually happened, when they were fighting about what they were to each other, when they started being together. On days when he drives her closer to desperation than she’d like to admit, she thinks that he should have one of his lowest points (along with the cave, Obie’s betrayal, his mother’s death) in writing, but Tony doesn’t need physical, textual, hard evidence of times he fucked up _beyond_ just fucking up. He, like everyone who’s ever lived, tends to dwell on the negative, and he’s allowed to remember that awful time in their lives but she won’t shove it in his face. 

Well, she would if it deterred him from making more bad decisions, but history with Tony has proven that it only encourages him to fuck up more, drive people away, and wait for them to rescue him.

**_Pepper Potts:_ ** _Not a problem, really. LGA tomorrow 3pm. Room for me and Happy at science prom?_

Tony doesn’t reply immediately. She works for a few more moments, then calls his favorite bagel place in New York so they can deliver their usual to the mansion. If Bruce wants to help keep Tony out of her hair, he’d better carb up. Anyway, bagels speak louder than words.

*

Pepper will leave Denver with sixteen signed contracts and the promise of ten more confirmations in the next week, pending board approval, which isn’t bad for one presentation and a day of manning an exhibitor table at this conference where she could sift through Tony’s email in between people talking to her and the other project managers actually in charge of running the rental side of everything. 

“We’re just surprised you came at all, Pepper,” Dan, the project manager next to her, says. “I mean, between the Avengers thing and everything—“

“Dan,” she says as she reads a particularly irate message Clint Barton sent Tony through SHIELD (good use of limited computer access there, Clint). “Does this make me a realtor? A real estate broker? What am I, actually?”

“Thinking of padding your resume some more?” he asks. “Pretty sure you could list anything on there and no one would question it. You could probably pull it off, too. You’re the queen of fake it till you make it.”

“Fake it until Tony makes it,” she replies. He laughs too hard and she flips to the next message. “If this was anyone else in the world, I wouldn’t be here. These buildings would sell themselves, but because it’s _Tony_ , I have to sell him. The suites are completely incidental.”

“So you’re here to sell Tony,” Dan says.

“Didn’t I just say that?” she asks. “I’d like you to find anyone else who can.”

Someone approaches them and asks whether Iron Man himself performs repairs to all supernatural damage inflicted on the buildings. Pepper’s tempted to slam her tablet across their face. Instead she smiles, hands the question over to Dan, and takes a sip from her tea. 

*

She and Happy arrive at the mansion a day and a half later. 

“It’s… quiet,” Happy says, that genius.

Pepper stands in the foyer with her rolling suitcase and listens, trying to locate what part of the house Tony is currently destroying in preparation for her arrival. He likes to greet her at the apex of hapless behavior whenever possible, because he needs her and she likes being needed. 

“JARVIS, where is everyone?” Pepper asks. Happy takes the suitcases and heads up the stairs while Pepper keeps trying to listen for chaos.

“Thank you for activating me, Ms. Potts,” JARVIS says to her for the first time _ever_. “Mr. Stark is currently in the kitchen.”

“And Bruce?”

“I have no information on his whereabouts. May I also offer you the opportunity to customize my tracking functionality for your user profile, Ms. Potts?”

“Oh my god,” Pepper says aloud. “Um, thanks JARVIS, we’ll talk later.”

“Of course, Ms. Potts. You are currently working in basic mode with my functionality. I will activate more advanced features when requested by your verbal signature.”

She walks to the kitchen in a daze because Tony and Bruce have done this and _now_ she’s fucking jealous.

*

“Ooh, here she comes,” Tony stage whispers as her heels click on the floor. She walks into the kitchen and there’s Tony over the toaster with a screwdriver. He looks over his shoulder and grins. “Hey, Pep. Give me a sec, this bagel’s almost toasted, just gotta get it out.”

“You updated JARVIS for Bruce,” Pepper says. She looks at Bruce sitting at the long kitchen island and offers him a cold smile. “Hi, Bruce.”

Bruce looks embarrassed and sheepish upon eye contact, but he offers her a little wave. “Hey, Pepper. Look, uh—“

Tony says, “You said it wasn’t a—“

“You’re the most inconsiderate, selfish ass who has ever—“ 

“It was a business decision—“

“A _business_ decision?!”

“That you told me to make! I did what you told me!”

“You _never_ listen to me, Tony Stark, and this wasn’t supposed to affect—“

“Ooh, using my full name now! Except it’s actually Anthony Edward Stark, all right, and maybe you want to bring all my mom’s last names into it, Virginia—“

“Bruce somehow rewired your brain to make you a considerate human being—“

“Yeah, he did, because he’s _my_ kind of asshole.”

“Christ, am I that bad?” Bruce laughs.

“I want to keep him,” Tony argues. 

(If Bruce opens his mouth to protest and neither of them notice, does it count?) 

“And if that means listening to reason and doing what you and our insurance reps and lawyers say and doing what Bruce says, then that’s what I’ll do, okay?” 

Pepper stares at him and then at the the screwdriver Tony points at her. He notices he’s almost brandishing it at her and puts it down because pointing is rude and pointing with potential weapons is much worse. “You always know what to say, Pepper. You’re perfect with words, you _always_ know what to say and what to do so I don’t know why it’s such a big deal that you were right. I made changes to JARVIS, who’s _literally_ my second brain most of the time, changes that mean I can keep Bruce and that something you’ve wanted since the minute I said _hey have you met JARVIS_ is now yours, too.”

“Give me a second,” Pepper says. 

“See, she’s my ragemonster, my knight in blazing fury,” Tony explains to Bruce. “Now do you understand why the other guy doesn’t faze me?”

Pepper shoots him a glare and Tony blows her a kiss that her glare incinerates.

 _All right, everything happened like I said it would_ , she thinks to herself. _Why is this upsetting? I did this. He’s right. TONY IS RIGHT. That’s wrong. That can’t be right, except he’s right because I told him what to do, he did it, Bruce is staying_ —

“Here’s the thing,” Pepper says once she works it out. “I like this. I do. I’m relieved it worked out. I’m glad Bruce is staying.”

“Yay,” Bruce says. “You guys have a way better satellite package than the bunker SHIELD offered.”

“Buddy, _we have our own satellite_ ,” Tony replies. “Also, I checked with my mental ethics database and it’s not prostitution that we slept together because I actually like you.”

“Didn’t think it was, but now I have my doubts,” Bruce replies.

“Here’s how this is going down,” Pepper interrupts because she might vomit on their honeymoon. “It’s a triangle. Our sides shouldn’t intersect—don’t give me any math nonsense about how triangles and lines actually work, okay, because I don’t care and this is what I want.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tony replies. He might be puffing out his chest even more to show off his triangle-shaped reactor core and she rolls her eyes at him. He beams, the jerk.

“So you and me will have our own thing, whatever it is,” Bruce says to Pepper.

“And you and Tony have your thing, and Tony and I have our own thing, and that doesn’t interfere with me and Tony without my input, all right?”

“Sounds. Yes. That makes a lot of sense, _Tony_ ,” Bruce says, giving him a smile. “Should have thought of that before. I thought you were a genius or something.”

“All this _communicating_ , is this something I really have to do now?” Tony sighs. 

“Just don’t change _my_ JARVIS settings while I’m out of town!” Pepper replies. “Don’t combine all our bedrooms without asking, don’t—“

“Can we get matching tattoos?” Tony asks.

“What?” Bruce asks.

“Tattoos must be unanimously approved by the coalition,” Pepper replies.

“Is Happy part of this?” Tony asks.

“Jesus, let’s beta test this for more than 90 seconds before we bring in more users who probably have their own input,” Pepper says. 

“That’s not a no,” Tony considers.

“It’s not a yes,” Pepper says.

Tony shrugs and opens his arms. “Welcome home?”

“Come here,” Pepper says as she kicks off her shoes and pushes them to the side.

They wrap their arms around each other and Pepper presses a kiss to the side of his neck, closes her eyes and rests her head against him for a long moment. Tony sways them side to side, his mouth against her hair, muttering something about how roommates weren’t this much of a pain in the ass in college.

“If you look around the table and you don’t know who the pain in the ass is—“ Pepper says. He laughs against her and the reactor is starting to dig against her chest but that’s good, it’s good that it’s there, _he’s_ there, it’s good that she’s here.

“Should I order pizza?” Bruce asks.

“Could you order me a salad? I can’t eat any more junk food right now,” Pepper says against Tony’s shirt. They might actually stay here forever and she wonders if she should time this for a better estimate of how long “forever” runs these days.

“Captain Steven Rogers is at the door, sir,” JARVIS announces.

“What?” Tony asks.

Pepper’s eyes widen where Tony can’t see her. _Oh, shit_. 

“So, like, three pizzas and a salad?” Bruce asks.

“Just buy the pizza place,” Tony announces.

“Stop _doing that_ ,” Pepper snaps. “It actually _slows down_ a service when you insist on buying it, or haven’t you noticed?” She pulls away from Tony and goes to let in the Star Spangled Man because, fuck. Those 45 seconds of stability and understanding were nice while they lasted.


	4. a road trip with agent hill

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I never liked Captain America,” Hill says somewhere near Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Agent Hill scans and pats down Steve for insecure or unauthorized tech (besides the phone Tony gave him that he used to call her in the first place) before she lets him climb into her car, then clicks her tongue and does the two-finger point to his duffle bag. He hands it over and she sets it on the ground 20 feet away before she scans, searches, and finally hands back to Steve so he can throw it into the backseat.

“Thanks, ma’am,” Steve says as she buckles her seat belt.

“I’d prefer Agent Hill, if you please,” she replies. “Buckle up,” she adds as she starts the car and the dashboard starts beeping.

“Do all cars do that?” Steve asks. “Make noises at you until you do what they want?”

She looks at him, crinkling her eyebrows, and says, “Yes. Cars are no longer giant blocks of steel that prevent your sudden, traumatic death by virtue of being bigger than other giant blocks of steel on the road. They’re much smarter now, but if they’re safer it’s mostly due to seat belts in every car. First and last defense against disaster on the road.”

He nods and then realizes the car is still beeping so he should find his seat belt.

“I never drove much in Brooklyn,” Steve says as he yanks and yanks and _yanks_ this belt around his chest to the little clicker somewhere next to his hip.

“I can’t blame you,” Hill replies. “Driving in New York should be authorized only for select vehicles. Also, I think roughly three million people should move out of the city.”

He thinks she cracks a smile, much more sudden and small than Agent Coulson, and he laughs because she might shoot him if he doesn’t.

“It’s five hours back to Manhattan, Captain Rogers,” Hill adds. “They’ll seem to pass faster if we make conversation.” She lets him have a second to think, then says, “I also have an electronic tablet in the glove compartment if you’d like to familiarize yourself with some of the brainless entertainment we as a culture have devised in the past few years. With the development of more advanced technology, particularly the slow obsolescence of…”

“I’m sorry, Agent Hill: it’s still called a glove compartment?” Steve interrupts. “I haven’t seen anyone wearing gloves _and_ driving yet, so I thought it’d be called something else by now.”

She sinks into silence for a long, long moment, and replies, “Yes. Yes it is. What else would you like to know? And please don’t be embarrassed. We’ve completely erased shame from our cultural consciousness since you’ve been MIA.”

“That’s a joke, but it’s really close to the truth,” Steve says.

“That’s what makes it so funny,” she replies. She looks at Steve again and says, “Everyone thinks Agent Coulson is SHIELD’s most amusing agent, but he has a terrible poker face.”

He wants to say something about how she refers to him in the present tense, but he drops it. There’s no need to make things awkward.

Rather, more awkward than they already are since Steve is currently taking a five-hour drive with a top agent of an organization that has a terrifying amount of power and whose shady, potentially mass destructive dealings he uncovered before Loki’s attempted war last week.

There was also the time they defrosted him in a lab and then let him sleep for a week in a shoddy 1940s studio set near Times Square. What are these people _thinking_ , exactly?

Yes, it’s pretty awkward.

*

Around hour two, Steve asks, “So what do you do for SHIELD, exactly?”

“I’m a level eight agent,” she replies. “Is Agent Coulson the only SHIELD agent with whom you’ve worked?”

“He’s the only one who talked to me, he and Director Fury. Hey, you said _whom_. No one says that anymore.”

“Agent Coulson and I occupy very different roles at SHIELD,” she says. He likes to be polite and look at people when they’re talking to him, even if Hill is currently driving and can’t see him, so he sees how she swallows hard and grips the wheel a little harder. “My apologies: we _did_ occupy very different roles.”

So she did notice. Except, Steve thinks, there’s no way of telling whether her momentarily white-knuckled grip on the wheel was due to forgetting Agent Coulson had died or that she had let the official cover down, if only momentarily.

Steve looks down at his hands in his lap; he doesn’t want to admit how much he’d like Coulson to still be alive, even if it means he’d never completely trust SHIELD again after pulling such a dirty trick on them—not that he trusts them now.

“What roles?” he asks, still looking down for a moment longer.

“He was a level seven agent to my level eight and Director Fury’s level ten. Ten’s the highest you can go within SHIELD.” Steve says nothing so she continues. “However, Agent Coulson’s role was primarily as a liaison between myself and Director Fury and our various assets.”

“Assets?” he asks.

“Assets. Talent. Specialists and consultants. Those recruited outside of typical agent SHIELD protocol and kept on outside the hierarchy. He had an extraordinary patience for dealing with the special personalities that we’re often required to work with.” He watches her some more, her mouth slightly open as she’s about to say something else, but it takes her a moment to say, “The specialists liked him, and he liked the specialists. It worked well for everyone.”

“He doesn’t have a replacement who could have come down to Virginia and picked me up?” Steve asks. “Not that you—I—”

“That’s classified, but if you’d like, I could drop you off on the shoulder here until we sort that out.” She looks at Steve and says, “See? I’m hilarious.”

“You are,” Steve laughs as he checks his seat belt in case one of the buttons on the steering wheel ejects him from the car. He probably could walk from Delaware to New York in a day or so, stop in Philadelphia because Bucky once told him it was nice, but he’d prefer not to without his shield or anything. “You still haven’t told me what you do, Agent Hill.”

“You noticed,” she replies. “Well, if Agent Coulson was our liaison with the outside world, I suppose you could think of me as Director Fury’s liaison with everyone else. I work very much within SHIELD. It’s a big enough job to keep me occupied.”

“You don’t wear suits,” he notes.

“The SHIELD skirts and pantsuits are made out of a terrible polyester blend that irritated my skin when I first joined; then I put on the one-piece field agent suit and never looked back.” Her face shifts a little into a smile as she says, “Agent Coulson’s suits weren’t exactly regulation, but that’s handlers for you.”

Steve laughs like he gets the joke, even though it wasn’t meant for him.

*

“I never liked Captain America,” Hill says somewhere near Allentown, Pennsylvania.

“Oh. Sorry to hear that,” Steve replies. “I suppose he’s not for everyone.”

“I had a hard time embracing my femininity when I was growing up,” Hill informs him. “I played outside with boys, threw out every doll I got, refused to wear dresses—if it was girly, I hated it.”

“Ah. That’s. I knew girls like that growing up.” He looks at Hill and grins, “They got away with murder. This one girl on my block stole candy from right under a soda jerk’s nose, but then when the jerk tried to blame the rest of us boys, she holds up the candy and says, _I stole it! You think these dopes could manage that?_ ”

“Sounds like something I would do.” He’s stopped looking to see if Agent Hill smiles like other people, but he sure knows admiration when he sees it. “I was the same girl, running with all the boys, and every week we’d all run down to the bookstore for the new comics they got in. Well, one week I was fed up. Fed up because my friends loved Captain America and I thought he was boring.” She loosens her grip on the wheel and relaxes into the seat just enough for Steve to notice. “I didn’t want to be Captain America.

“And then, the woman behind the counter said, _I have something special you might like_ , and she was looking only at me, right at me, because the boys were neck-deep in your latest adventures. She leads me back to the history section and there’s a book that teachers would have said was far too big for me, far too advanced, but I could handle it.”

“What was the book?” 

“ _Savior and Sweetheart: The Peggy Carter Story_.”

Steve breaks out in a sweat. Instantly, without warning, a cold hand from the ice runs a finger down his neck and he has to close his eyes, ignore the churning and anxiety in his stomach.

“Yeah?” he manages. He opens his eyes and stares ahead into the darkness, the endless road and night ahead of them. If he focuses on the yellow lines flying by them, he’ll be fine. He’s fine.

“She was never your girlfriend,” Hill says, because a detail like that is important to her and if it’s painful to him, if it’s salt in the wound, well, what does it matter, they never did get that dance. “She did so much, before you and after. Once I knew these books existed, I went to the library and sat in the stacks every day after school, reading every book on her I could find.”

“There were lots, huh?” Steve asks.

“You were— _are_ —a national icon. If you were Jesus, she was Mary. Maybe all the Marys combined,” Hill says. “She got hate mail for her wedding, Captain, and I joined the Army so I could be like her. I ran after SHIELD, waving with both hands until they noticed me, so I could be like her.”

“Well,” Steve says, “It worked. You remind me of her.”

“That’s kind of you to say, Captain, but it’s not necessary.”

“I’m not just saying that,” Steve protests. “You’re both—she was—you’re a very no-nonsense woman, like Peggy. You look like you would shoot me in the vibranium shield if I got out of line—did the books mention that? She did that. Or the time she strong-armed Howard Stark into flying us behind enemy lines to bring down a HYDRA base. I couldn’t have done that without her. You’re cut from the same cloth, Agent Hill, and it’s rare but it’s true.”

Hill replies, “Thank you, Captain Rogers.”

“Please, it’s Steve.”

“I prefer Captain Rogers.”

“Well. Okay.”

*

Newark, New Jersey, right by the airport. It looks as depressing as a war zone without actually being one. Hill says they’re about 30 minutes from the city and then he can spend the night at a SHIELD facility before deciding what to do about a more permanent residence.

“What are my options?” Steve asks, though he knows he shouldn’t accept help from SHIELD. He shouldn’t, but he hasn’t got a choice, has he?

“We have some safe houses in the metropolitan area that you could take advantage of, though they’re all in need of some major work that we can’t quite cover with our budget right now, thanks to the heat we’re getting for the collateral damage caused during the Loki incident,” Hill replies. “Then there’s the matter of your technical status as a person: namely, you’re still MIA/presumed dead and there are a couple of bureaucrats still calculating the best way to fold you into the 21st century. We also have the residential bunks where you’ll be spending tonight, which are intended to be short-term, but we could get you a colonel’s private room if you’re thinking of staying in the long-term.”

He can’t run to Bucky’s apartment and sleep in his bed because his family’s apartment feels too empty without his mother, without the father he barely remembers. He’s got no other friends who can take him in, not in this—

“I’ll work something out,” Steve says, keeping his voice level. He has the tiniest glimmer of a plan, feels a surge of adrenaline and fear at the potential solution and the possible rejection, but he’s got to try. “Thank you, though, for the offer. I’ll stay at SHIELD tonight.”

“Not a problem,” Hill says.

They don’t talk for the rest of the drive, not until they reach SHIELD at about 3 AM. Hill checks him in, leads him to his room, and leaves him there, professional and composed, like she didn’t just drive him through five states in as many hours.

“Also, for the record,” Hill calls out because she can probably read minds, too. “We’ll be issuing you a SHIELD phone, like we do for all our assets, so keep Stark’s if you’d like something for yourself, but we’ll be in touch with you through the SHIELD device.” 

“Do I really need all these gadgets, Agent Hill?” Steve asks. He tries not to sigh, but it escapes him anyway because _does he, really_?

She considers him for a couple of long, uncomfortable seconds before she replies, “I think you’ll appreciate the independence they offer you. For instance, you asked me two questions about updates to culture from your time to ours, though we had ample time to discuss such things and because you don’t know me well, you shouldn’t have felt embarrassed.”

“I wasn’t embarrassed, I was—“

“Yes, we were having excellent conversations, I understand, but you have a lot to learn and you seem to prefer to use people as a last resort for knowledge. If anything, these _gadgets_ will provide you with everything you’ve missed so you can learn on your own time. I’ll find a junior tomorrow to sit down with you and review these devices and their use.” Steve must look overwhelmed because she has to say it again: “You won’t have to depend on us.”

He nods and says thank you, agrees to the training session, but it’s only when he enters his room and closes the door firmly behind him that he lets himself think that about all the talons SHIELD wants to dig into him and whether he can ever really free himself from them at all.


	5. inside the walls of the heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They live and breathe a world he has never known and will never know, not if Steve stays inside and talks to JARVIS for a hundred years and learns everything Tony’s programmed him to know.

So there was that time that CAPTAIN AMERICA showed up at Tony’s front door and Tony was instantly flooded with all the feelings. Literally every single one, like: _IT’S CAPTAIN AMERICA why aren’t we in Malibu so I can show him I still have his shitty toy shields I wish Coulson could be here wow that’s a downer but here look it’s STEVE I knew he secretly loved me okay maybe not but here’s real proof he doesn’t hate me or actually it means everyone does have a price and Steve’s is probably “avoiding homelessness” OH GOD WHY AM I LIKE THIS STEVE IS A FRIEND STEVE IS A NICE PERSON ISN’T IT GREAT STEVE IS HERE?! YAY STEVE._

“Did you really see all of America in only ten days?” Tony asks as he moves aside so Steve could come inside.

“It’s a strange story,” he replies. “My bike broke down somewhere in Virginia, in a really small town, and the people kind of—I think they thought I was God? Then they wouldn’t fix my bike and kind of trapped me in the city limits until I called Agent Hill to come get me in the middle of the night. Other than that, they were really nice.”

Tony purses his lips and says, “Well, you’re right, that’s—hold on, worshiped you as a _god_? Pepper, how have we not gotten into the religion industry yet? We have all the iconography! It wouldn’t be hard to put together some liturgies and a gospel or four, right?”

“Tony,” Steve sighs.

“I’m going to privatize religion,” Tony announces. “Wait, it’s already privatized, you know, theoretically. I’m going to _Starkify_ religion.”

“I’m going to order some pizzas,” Bruce adds. 

*

 **From:** secmsg@shld.int

 **To:** bartoncf@shld.int

 **Subject:** COMMUNICATION FROM S.H.I.E.L.D. PERSONNEL

You have received a secure communication from S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel (ROGERS, S). Please access this message via the link below. You will require the login information provided for you by your S.H.I.E.L.D. contact.

This message was automatically generated. Please do not reply at this address.

\- - -

Hi, Hawkeye,

How are you? I am at Stark Mansion. Tony gave me an Apple MacBook and said I should practice emailing, so I thought I would say hello.

I hope you are safe and doing well after all our excitement in Manhattan the other day. Will you be back in New York soon? Please let me know when you are back in town and we can catch that ballgame we talked about or maybe a pizza. Cheese tastes different now. It’s a little thing, but it makes a lot of difference. (Present cheese is better.)

All right. This message has gotten long enough, so I’ll end it. SHIELD gave me a phone if you would like to text message me. I also have a phone from Tony, but the SHIELD one is much easier to use. Tony is mad I said that, but it’s true. Bruce agrees with me. I hope you are well. If Natasha is with you, please tell her I say hello. I hope she’s doing well.

Sincerely,

Steve Rogers

*

A few mornings later, Pepper goes to the kitchen at 6:30 to brew the house’s usual economy-sized pot of coffee that would get them all out of the house on time.

Except she notices halfway down the staircase that the house already smells of coffee. She feels it right there, somewhere in her knees: a piece of her soul dying with glee because someone ( _Steve_ ) had woken up first and rather than going straight to the workshop and waiting for someone to make coffee ( _Tony, Bruce_ ), he had _made coffee_. 

She enters the kitchen and there’s Steve, sitting at the island, eating a mixing bowl of cereal, drinking a giant mug of coffee, the pot happily warming on the counter across from him. He turns around and smiles at her, doesn’t offer a cereal-spattered “good morning” in her direction and all over his shirt, and turns back to his—his _newspaper_. Made of _paper_ with _ink_ that’s staining his fingers. 

Pepper gives him a little wave, pours herself a cup of coffee, and turns around to look at Steve.

“I love you,” she says. 

Steve smiles and looks at his bowl, bashful and adorable. Pepper wants to do embarrassing things like sit on his lap, croon old standards in his ear (Patsy Cline’s “You Belong to Me” is playing at a particularly loud volume in the back of her head and she _has_ to ignore it), pet his hair, ask him what the hell he’s doing awake at 6:30 in the morning and what right he has to look so composed and perfect in a kitchen that isn’t his. 

Instead, she scoops two sugars into her coffee and heads back upstairs for a shower and a date with her detachable showerhead because _Jesus Christ,_ the pheromones of a gorgeous _and_ competent person can rush into her brain and leave her punch-drunk like nothing else.

*

Tony shuffles in next. He nods in Steve’s direction, pours himself a cup of coffee, and lets it sit as he goes to the fridge and grabs one of his green drinks. Then he grabs his mug and stands in front of Steve, staring at him until he suddenly shuffles off again, the thermos of green cradled in his left arm like a baby and the mug in his right hand clutched to his chest. 

*

Bruce comes downstairs, makes tea, has some cereal out of a much smaller bowl than the one Steve is using, and scrolls endlessly on the tablet Steve thinks he pulled out of nowhere. When he’s done with the cereal, he mutters, “Bye,” and runs back upstairs.

Steve hoped it would be a quiet morning, but not this quiet?

*

At quarter to eight, Happy lets himself in, pours himself coffee, and sits down across from Steve at the kitchen island. They say “good morning” to each other and Happy starts reading the sections of the newspaper Steve’s finished.

Steve finishes the Metro section and asks Happy, “So… what do you do… exactly…?”

“Bodyguard, drive everyone around,” Happy replies. “Tony, Pepper and I go way back.”

“Oh,” Steve says.

“You haven’t been down to the tower yet,” Happy notes.

“I had some things to take care of at SHIELD.”

“Well, if today’s your first day of freedom, _don’t_ spend it with these lunatics,” Happy replies. “Plenty of time for that when they roll back in at 6:30, 7, ready to bicker until they pass out.”

“I noticed. Uh, yesterday. Couldn’t miss it.”

“Happy!” Pepper calls out as she comes down the stairs, dressed like she’s ready for a fashion shoot. Steve watches her work on her phone as she stands at the bottom of the stairs, hand on the banister, the rest of her sentence trapped somewhere between her phone and her mouth. “Happy,” she says after a minute. “That lunch date was moved to _dinner, practically_ , so I don’t have to be on the Upper West Side until 2:30, and Tony has to be dragged to the dentist at 2:45, so take him to Dr. Nicolini and could you wait for him? It should be quick—“

“I’m not going to the dentist,” Tony answers as he comes downstairs, pulling a blazer on over his t-shirt. “Hap, don’t take me. You don’t have to, you know. I electronically sign your checks.”

“Yeah, but you don’t have the attention span to make my life a living hell, and Pepper does,” Happy replies. 

“ _Fine_. I’ll have my teeth cleaned, I guess, if it has to come to this,” Tony sighs. “One day I’ll teach myself dentistry and I’ll be the best at that, too.”

Bruce follows, too, and says, “I can help, if you want. Never studied dentistry, but I can yank all your teeth out and solve all of your problems.”

“Don’t joke about that in a house with as many pairs of pliers as this one,” Happy warns him. 

“And didn’t we all learn a valuable lesson that day?” Tony asks. “None of us are good with nipple clamps. It’s a good thing to know, even this late in the game.”

“Hey guys,” Steve interrupts. Four faces turn to him, genuinely shocked (pleasantly so, he hopes?) that he’s there and participating. “I thought I’d cook dinner for you all, if you like. Since you’re all gonna be out and… well, there’s only so much pizza you can eat, right?”

“And Lean Cuisines, don’t forget that,” Happy says.

“There is no such thing as _too much pizza_ ,” Tony says. “But let’s not test that because I’m getting kind of sick of pizza.”

“That—that actually sounds great,” Pepper says, looking up from her phone because some invisible, revelatory light is shining in her face from somewhere. “A home-cooked meal. I genuinely forgot those existed since Tony drove away—“

“Let’s not pin the blame on anyone, okay, how about that,” Tony says, “And let’s marvel at Captain America cooking the bacon we’re all gonna bring home. What a fantastic subversion of classic Americana. I’m gonna puke a Rockwell palette.”

“Great!” Steve says, even if he only understood about 60% of that sentence.

“Pepper’s allergic to strawberries,” Happy notes. “Tony’s allergic to good taste and manners.”

“I don’t like peas,” Bruce says.

“How is that possible?” Tony asks. “They’re not even a food.”

“So it shouldn’t be a problem to skip the peas.”

“Do you hate all green food or just peas?”

“Everyone, car, now,” Pepper says as she leads the way. “Bye, Steve, call us if you need something! JARVIS automatically calls the fire department if three of the four smoke alarms around the kitchen go off.”

“And use JARVIS!” Tony calls as Bruce is shoving him out the door.  “He’s the key to existence!”

“It’s terrifying how you think that’s true,” Bruce says.

“There’s a supermarket on 68th and 3rd, and a bunch of little gourmet places in every direction from here,” Happy says. “You should go to the supermarket. Oh, and ask JARVIS about that grocery place that delivers, I think we have an account there. Tell them you’re Captain America; I bet it’s free.”

Pepper rushes back in and says, “Money. Literally every single person in this house forgets that occasionally we need to use _paper currency_.” 

“I have money, Pepper,” Steve protests.

“Yes, but here’s more,” she says and that is a _lot_ of money to keep in a wallet. “We’re trying to work _something_ out so you could get a card because Tony doesn’t believe in paper, like, _at all_ , so you can see how that’s problematic.”

“Pepper, this is a year’s rent,” Steve says, afraid to touch the money Pepper put down in front of him.

“Mmm, not anymore. This is about three minutes’ property taxes on the mansion,” she replies. “We’ll figure something out but it might involve a fake identity and other vaguely unethical things that you probably shouldn’t know about. Bye, have a good day! Come on, Happy!”

Once the door shuts behind all of them, Steve has another cup of coffee and stares at nothing as he tries to get his head back in order.

*

Before he left SHIELD for Stark Mansion, Agent Hill noted the obvious: Steve had a lot to catch up on with regard to the world, and they could help him out with that or he could let Tony help.

“Frankly, I think this might be the only thing Tony Stark has ever been qualified to do,” she mused. “Sure, there’s the mechanical genius thing, but that falls under the bigger umbrella of Tony Stark embodying everything forward-thinking.”

And that excited Steve, because he thought it was true! It matched up with the Tony he knew!

The Tony he kind of knew. The Tony he thought he’d like to know.

Except the real Tony reared his head and said on his second day in the mansion:

“Right, so all of us have like, experiments we’re running at the tower and things we need to do, companies we need to pretend we run while actually doing other things so you’re on your own. JARVIS!”

Steve had opened his mouth to ask what they were working on, maybe have a conversation with Tony, but Pepper was already simultaneously yelling at someone on the phone while yelling up the stairs at Bruce that they were leaving without him so Tony didn’t have much time, either.

“So you talk to JARVIS, tell him what you want to know, what you want to watch, read, anything, whatever, and he’ll take care of it. You want to watch every Katharine Hepburn movie made in your first lifetime and catch up on the rest? You can do that! You want to, I don’t know, learn everything there is to know about giant African land snails and whether you can keep one as a pet in Manhattan: go for it. That’d be cute, actually, look that up, I hear they’re friendly.”

“That… okay. Yes.”

They stood there for a long moment, looking at each other, and then Tony said, “WELL, BYE,” and ran after Pepper.

So Steve had spent the morning watching _The Philadelphia Story_ , practicing his typing, tidying up (until a small army of housekeepers showed up to do that for him), going on a very long run around Manhattan, and thinking long and hard about what he could do with this new life.

*

The truth is, Steve feels uncomfortable talking to someone he can’t see. He wonders if Tony would ever consider giving JARVIS a face or a screen or something, but maybe screens are old-fashioned now? JARVIS seems to know a lot more than his MacBook, so it’s not a totally crazy thing to think, is it?

“JARVIS,” Steve says. “Hi. It’s Steve. Steve Rogers?”

“Good morning, Captain Rogers,” JARVIS replies from everywhere around him. “And how may I assist you this morning?”

“Well,” Steve begins. “I’d like—I’d like to cook dinner for everyone tonight, but I don’t know where to start. I’m a little out of practice and I wasn’t the best cook in the world, before, so where—I’m not a beginner, but I’m a little out of practice and—”

“A preliminary search of recipe databases suggests this classic recipe may be compatible with your level of expertise and the dietary requirements of the permanent residents in my database,” JARVIS replies as he shocks Steve by projecting a recipe for a beef brisket in the air in front of him. “If this seems agreeable to you, I can send the ingredients to your mobile phone and direct you to the nearest market.”

“That’s really helpful, JARVIS. Yeah, send it to my phone! My Stark phone! And we’ll go shopping! I’ll go get dressed. What time’s the market open?”

“9 AM, sir. If you’d like, I can air an episode of the cooking program that features this recipe, _The French Chef_ starring Julia Child, and keep it on hand as a reference point for when you are preparing the dish later.”

Now Steve’s kind of glad that JARVIS doesn’t have a face because he might be tempted to kiss it and thank it and treat it like a real person, not—whatever it actually is. Is that unkind? Should he thank a computer?

“Okay, do that. And thank you, JARVIS. I’ll go to the TV room.”

“Very good, sir.”

*

Steve’s mother had died as he finished high school and started taking classes at the local college. Suddenly, he had been even more alone in his family’s apartment than he before. For as long as he could remember, his mother had worked long hours, so Steve knew what it was to keep himself busy without relying on other people for anything.

Once his mother died, though, he (with some guilt) felt a little freer and decided to move things around a bit because who would complain? No one. He could do what he wanted in the apartment now that he was alone, collecting his parents’ pensions and inviting Bucky over as much as he could. He didn’t want to be that inconsiderate neighbor who kept his radio on too loud all the time, so he moved it into the kitchen and put it on loud enough so he could hear it over the sound of him getting dinner ready for himself and sometimes for Bucky, too. Sometimes his mothers’ friends would come to check up on him because a nice young boy like Steve Rogers shouldn’t be _alone_. 

He was alone, though. He was alone a lot, so he made up for it. It was a little comforting, actually, that it looked like his time at Stark Mansion would be more familiar than not since everyone would be out at the Tower working all day and he go around and do as he pleased around the city and the mansion all day long.

(It’s terrifying, too, because he doesn’t know what he’s going to _do_ with his life, but this is a good start. This is adjusting. Right?)

He’s thinking about all that, his old life way back when, back before Erskine and the Army and everything, while he’s cooking according to JARVIS’s specifications. JARVIS, he discovers, is the best kind of helper in the kitchen—the kind he really wanted back then, when it was him and the big chunky radio and sometimes too many things with only his two hands to do. JARVIS flashes new pages of instructions, answers questions for him, knows where everything is in the kitchen, and even plays music for him while he’s cooking! JARVIS is the best radio Steve’s ever known.

He’s making sides, potatoes and a salad and probably too much food but that’s fine because he can eat a lot _and_ he can have some tomorrow, and he can send some home with Happy, too, if it’s really too much.

And suddenly he’s back in his Brooklyn apartment and everything he’s doing kind of sounds like the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”, like:

“Gon-na cook, gon-na cook, gonna cook some good food and it’s gonna be great.”

_First I’m gonna peel all these po-tay-toes_

_then I’m gonna wash ‘em and soak ‘em good_

_and then I’ll go and grab that salad bag!_

_I should have bought them fresh, but there was a bag_

_And I’m opening, and I am rinsing,_

_and I’m putting all these veggies into a big bowl, yeah!_

“Sir, would you prefer if I switched to the Andrews Sisters’ rendition of your song?” JARVIS asks. Steve looks up because that’s where JARVIS seems to live, sort of, in a speaker near the light fixture.

“Don’t you like my song, JARVIS? There’s more where that came from!”

“Indeed, sir,” JARVIS says. “Perhaps I should raise the volume on the track currently playing?”

“You can make it as loud as you want, but I’m gonna keep singing!” 

“Very good, sir. I will leave you to it and remind you that you are due to baste the beef again in one minute.”

“Thanks, JARVIS!” And he sings:

_Oh I’m gonna open the oven right right now_

_Gonna get the baster and baste the meat_

_If Tony were here_

_Well he’d say something dirty and I would frown_

_But they’re still at work and I don’t care_

_And here I am, basting meat like Julia Child_

That’s when Steve stands up straight and closes the oven, turns around with the baster in his hand, and sees that Tony, Pepper, Bruce and Happy are lined up against the back wall of the kitchen, covering their mouths and, in Happy’s case, biting on his fist to stop himself from laughing. Tony is holding up his phone pointed at him and oh, no—

“Don’t stop now, bugle boy,” Tony says. “I’m getting all this in HD and I could go for _hours_.”

“I—uh,” Steve stammers. “JARVIS, can you open the floor so the earth can swallow me alive?”

“I apologize, sir, but I don’t recognize that command,” JARVIS replies.

“I made a salad,” Steve finally says to his audience.

“You’ve made me ruin my makeup,” Pepper says as she dabs at her eyes with a tissue. She leaves the kitchen and says as she goes, “Oh, God, nothing will ever be this good again, ever ever ever.”

“I liked the part,” Bruce begins, “With your butt. When you were doing the little basting dance. Could you do it again?”

“Steve,” Tony says as he puts the phone back in his pocket, “We could tape this and sell it to a charity for like, _millions_. You could help so many kids, Steve. Steve, please do the butt dance again.”

“JARVIS, I’d like that music louder now, please,” Steve announces.

“We should never go to work again, right?” Tony asks Bruce as they leave Steve alone in the kitchen to finish dinner. “We should sit in the workshop and watch the tapes of Steve here alone all day.” 

“Tony,” Steve protests as he sets some potatoes to boil. 

“Security purposes!” Tony shouts. “I’m doing this for America!”

Steve sighs and says, “Louder, JARVIS.”

*

One day, it's pouring. Sheets and buckets of rain, cats and dogs, a hurricane, it's all happening outside the mansion. Steve looks at it from his bedroom window, thinks for a second, then puts on a sweatshirt Tony gave him and goes back to bed—not to sleep, but to crack open a book and read until it drops onto his chest and he nods off. Tony, Pepper and Bruce probably rush out the door, same as usual, but they don't knock or ask for him, so he sleeps in for the first time since he was in high school (10 or 80 years ago, who's counting?)

He makes it downstairs eventually, uses the microwave for the third time in his life so he can reheat the coffee Pepper made, and stations himself in the TV room. If he's going to stay in and be lazy then dammit, he's going to _stay in_ and _be lazy_. He nods, satisfied with his commitment to laziness, and immediately breaks it to grab some cereal and milk before really “becoming one with the couch,” as Tony calls it.

"JARVIS," he says after five minutes of a morning show with very loud people and their fake enthusiasm. "I'd like to watch a movie. Something nice, with a happy ending. Maybe a musical?"

"Sir, may I recommend the 1965 classic _The Sound of Music_?" JARVIS asks. "A woman, played by Julie Andrews, leaves a convent to become a governess to a retired sea captain and his seven children." 

That sounds... strange. “When’s it set? And where?”

JARVIS says, “The film takes place in 1930s Austria with the impending German occupation playing a large part in the plot, but there is no violence or open warfare."

Steve eats some more cereal and says, "But it ends happily?"

"The film is based on the true story of the Von Trapp family, who left Austria after it was occupied by Germany. In reality, they boarded a train to Italy and went on to become known around the world for their singing. This film is widely considered an American classic. You may also wait until next Easter when it is aired with a heavy number of commercials on one of the major American networks.”

"Well," Steve says, "Let's give it a shot."

*

The TV room has a huge, _huge_ flatscreen against the wall; since JARVIS is pretty much _magic_ to Steve's understanding, all of Steve's questions are answered with projections in midair. It might get annoying when other people are around, but it's the middle of the day and everyone's out so Steve can ask JARVIS as many questions as he likes.

"JARVIS, who's this lady singing? Maria. She's... she's good. Would I like more movies that she's in?"

"A dog whistle for kids? I don’t care how long your wife’s been dead, buddy, you shouldn’t treat your kids like that.”

"Liesel, this guy's bad news!"

"JARVIS, can you—I don't know—remember this song? Save it? So I can listen to it later? It's so nice. I like her favorite things."

"JARVIS, who plays the baroness? She's... she's really something. Wow. _Wow_."

"Puppets! Look at that! Did they really make all those? Man, those kids must have a lot of time on their hands. JARVIS, I like this song. Aw, they got a baby goat puppet, too."

" _WHAT?_ Maria, you can’t—don’t leave! She's jealous! He loves you! That dance! Wait, _intermission?!_ Okay, keep intermission on, JARVIS, I'll be back."

"Okay, start it back up. Boy, you better not have been lying to me about this ending happily."

"Aw, let the kids see her! Come on, nuns!"

"Auf wiedersehen, Baroness. More movies with her, JARVIS, please."

*

Steve comes in from a run one night and on his way to the shower, he stops in the kitchen for a bottle of water and then the TV room, where he finds Tony, Bruce, and Pepper gathered in front of the giant TV, watching something that looks—

“ _What_ ,” Steve winces as he looks away. “Why’d he kill that poor dog like that?”

“Steve!” Pepper says as she turns around on the couch. “Pause, JARVIS. Steve, I’m so sorry you had to be introduced to _Game of Thrones_ like this. It’s such a good show; we were getting Bruce caught up on it.” 

“Oh,” Steve says.

“It’s a gory mess,” Tony says as he turns on the couch, too. Bruce looks over his shoulder at Steve, gives him a little wave, and then goes back to the tablet in his lap. Steve leans against the doorway a little; Tony and Pepper have their arms over the back of the couch, Bruce in the middle, each of them with one arm along the back so their fingertips touch and fight until Bruce swats them away because they’re brushing the back of his neck. “But it’s good and we’re only on the second episode. You could catch up and we’ll all watch the third episode tomorrow.”

“Um, I don’t know,” Steve replies. He looks down at the bottle of water he grabbed from the fridge and picks at the plastic top a little. “It doesn’t seem very… I don’t think I’d like it.”

“Indeed, sir,” JARVIS says. “You suggested I warn you when a work contains extreme amounts of violence or graphic violence, and this particular program contains both.”

“Well,” Steve says. “If you’re watching something without all that, let me know and I’ll join you.”

“I think that’s all the TV I can do for tonight, actually,” Pepper sighs. “I have to get ready for a conference call with New Zealand.”

“Are they finally going to send us some clock spiders?” Tony asks. “Because I think that’s why no one’s ever tried to destroy New Zealand. Terrifying wildlife. We need to get some. Guys.” Tony puts his hands up, right in Bruce and Pepper’s faces so they’re paying attention to him. “Guys. What if the Mark VIII shot _clock spiders_? Like, animatronic—”

“If you create a clock spider problem in America, I’m going to cure it by making you eat every single one on the planet,” Bruce says as he looks back to his tablet.

“Agreed,” Pepper says. “And _huntsman_ spiders are Australia’s problem. New Zealand has its own terrifying host of wildlife, which we won’t be discussing on this call—much to your disappointment, I’m sure.”

“I don’t want to know, do I?” Steve interrupts.

The three of them look up and exchange glances, decide that no, Steve very much doesn’t want to know. 

“Wait, I Googled it,” Bruce says. “They’re in New Zealand, too.”

“We’re _not. getting. huntsman. spiders_.” 

“What about this offshoot species, these little baby ones? They don’t get bigger than your hand.”

“BRUCE THAT IS ALREADY TOO BIG.”

Tony begins to say, “That’s what—” but Pepper and Bruce immediately reply, “NO.”

They remember Steve is there and turn back to talk to him, but Steve doesn’t linger in the doorway much longer. He feels that stillness hanging in the air and thinks they must feel it, too; the sense that he’s intruding and that even if he wasn’t, he can’t keep pace with these people. They live and breathe a world he has never known and will never know, not if he stays inside and talks to JARVIS for a hundred years and learns everything Tony’s programmed him to know.

He smiles at them and leaves the doorway, and he hears the credits music start again before someone laughs and Pepper says something that makes Tony yell at JARVIS like his life depends on it. Even if the three of them weren’t thinking about all the ways they don’t connect with him, Steve thinks, it comes down to them deciding they’re going to make time to do something together and he’s not part of their together.

“Get yourself together, Rogers,” he says to himself as he grabs clothes and heads into his bathroom.

The MacBook from Tony catches his eye and an idea crosses his mind. He stands in the middle of his room for a moment and thinks this quiet little plan through for a few more seconds. It’s low-risk and quickly executed with no serious repercussions, so he sits at the desk and lifts the computer’s lid, composing the message under his breath as he moves the little arrow around and, eventually, begins to type.

*

 **From:** secmsg@shld.int

 **To:** rogerss@shld.int

 **Subject:** COMMUNICATION FROM S.H.I.E.L.D. PERSONNEL

You have received a secure communication from S.H.I.E.L.D. Personnel (BARTON, C). Please access this message via the link below. You will require the login information provided for you by your S.H.I.E.L.D. contact.

This message was automatically generated. Please do not reply at this address.

\- - -

hi cap;

knew that couldn’t last more than a hot second. pack light. we have extra outdoor gear. get rid of your stark phone. bring your shield one. you can find us at the coordinates below. we like our privacy. we think you might like yours too.

see you soon

cb

no really crush your stark phone into like 90 pieces. it feels so good.

*

“I’m surprised you lasted a week with Stark,” Natasha says when Steve arrived a few days later.

They’re about 70 miles away from Manhattan in northeast Pennsylvania. When he enters the specified clearing, Steve is genuinely surprised that there’s a cabin, built in the style of a few others he’s seen on his hike except somehow more remote. It’s like there wasn’t supposed to be a cabin here in this very thick patch of woods, but someone put one down anyway. Then again, he’s not that surprised. Of course this is where he would find Clint and Natasha.

“Says you, and you shadowed him for _months_ ,” Clint notes.

“I’ve been trained to put up with a lot worse,” Natasha replies.

“He meant well,” Steve says. They both turn their heads slowly to stare at him. He does mean it, though, and tells them. They’re barely convinced.

“Put down your stuff, stay a while,” Clint says. “There’s a lake about a mile north of here, if you’re so inclined, and there’s mountains and shit if you want to go hiking. No TV inside, but there’s a portable broadband thing on our laptop and your SHIELD phone should still work.”

“Thanks for letting me stay with you,” Steve says, hoping they hear how much he means it.

Natasha nods and says to Clint, “Didn’t you say you were going fishing?”

“So sick of _fish_ already. Maybe I’ll find a dolphin this time.”

“Hope springs eternal.” She looks to Steve and says, “I’m going for a run, so you’ll have the cabin to yourself. Or you can join either of us, I suppose.”

Steve nods and they go into the cabin before preparing to go their separate ways.

*

 **From:** secmsg@shld.int

 **To:** steverogers@stark.com, rogerss@shld.int 

 **Subject:** COMMUNICATION FROM S.H.I.E.L.D. PERSONNEL

You have received a secure communication from S.H.I.E.L.D. Personnel (BANNER, R). Please access this message via the link below. You will require the login information provided for you by your S.H.I.E.L.D. contact.

This message was automatically generated. Please do not reply at this address.

\- - -

Just so you know, it took us a day and a half to find the note you left us because it was on paper. Actually, we didn’t even find it. Tony called up Hill to demand where SHIELD had put you, she came over, and she found your note, folded up nicely on the kitchen table where we all missed it because IT WAS WRITTEN ON PAPER, STEVE. WHERE DID YOU EVEN FIND PAPER IN THIS PLACE? 

I’m sorry we didn’t get to spend too much time together before you left. Let us know when you’re back in Manhattan, or we’ll see you at the next global crisis. (There’s always another one and you know it.)

-Bruce

*

The first morning, Steve leaves his room, combing his fingers through his hair and trying to make it do something, anything reasonable before he showers. He stops when he sees Natasha walking away from the stove into the middle of the space that (even by his outdated standards) lacks the electronic entertainment equipment required to call it a “living room.” Her eyes flick up to take him in and they smile at each other. She seems glad to see him.

“You’re awake,” she notes. “I didn’t know what kind of hours you would keep.”

“Pretty regular ones now.” Steve heads into the kitchen area and asks, “And you?”

“I don’t sleep a lot. Never have. Clint sleeps more, but.” Steve opens a cabinet and finds two mugs, at which point Natasha says, “Don’t use the one with the roadrunner on it. That’s Clint’s. Use the one with the fish on it. The cod.”

“Sure,” Steve says as he carefully takes it off the shelf. “Which is your mug?” he asks as he pours himself coffee. 

She turns the mug in her hands so he can see the brown bear. He smiles, leans against the counter, doesn’t ask, so she offers: “Animals from our homes. Well, except Clint’s—he broke his Iowa mug, so Coulson bought him one in New Mexico.”

“He’s had a rough few weeks, hasn’t he?”

“That’s why I’m thinking we should play pirates,” Natasha replies. She looks back to the space she’s standing in and then moves to the built-in shelves with some books and a couple of small objects carelessly arranged. She picks up a small lion and a dinosaur and says, “We set a two-mile radius and each of us takes an object, hides it in that radius, and then after a few days we go out and try to find them all. First one to find the most of them wins.”

Steve’s first question is: “Is cheating allowed?”

Natasha’s about to speak, but her eyes dart away and Steve follows her line of vision: there’s Clint, leaning against the doorframe, tired but pleased.

“He is _so_ ready to play pirates,” Clint says. 

“Thank you,” Steve replies. He smiles his best smile for them before he says, “But guys, I’m ready to _win_ at pirates.”

Natasha scoffs and Clint rushes to the bookcase, grabs a small plastic stag that was keeping up a two-volume set before both books tip over, and rushes back into the bedroom. The door slams behind him and Steve looks at Natasha.

“He probably went out the window,” Natasha replies, plain as can be. “Are you going to have the rest of the coffee?”

*

Natasha said that when they played pirates, a lot of the challenge was in sneaking around without actually sneaking—they would bury their pieces while out of the cabin, and then at some point everyone would give up their pretenses and disappear into the woods where the search could begin in earnest.

None of them are that patient this time, not by a long shot. Natasha spends two hours bustling around the cabin, gutting a couple of fish Clint caught, checking email, before she says she’s heading out for a run with a small bag over her shoulder. Steve realizes he’s the sucker left behind. The game’s _well_ underway.

However, neither of the others can win until he buries his token (a plastic dinosaur he recognizes from the Museum of Natural History), so he grabs a pack from the closet, fills up the water bottle inside, and heads south.

He keeps his eyes out for Clint and Natasha. Their whole thing in the field, he thinks, is stealth. They hide until the last possible moment. Once they make themselves visible or known—the rush of Clint’s arrow or the shock of Natasha’s wrist pieces—it’s too late, so he concentrates on signs they left on the forest around them. They can be as stealthy as they like, but they’re still human, still have to have an impact on their environment. It could be as small as marks on a tree trunk from Clint’s boots as he climbed up to perch or Natasha’s faint but distinct long strides on the earth.

Steve circles east, avoiding the lake when he hears it because it’s open and the earth too soft and easily marked. He thinks he’s following a set of Natasha’s prints parallel his own trail—and there it is, a small plastic lion, resting on a tree branch about 20 feet away and a couple of feet above his eye level (but that must have seemed high to Natasha, who went out for her “run” without lifts in her shoes).

He steps into the shadow of another tree and looks around for a catch—maybe she or Clint are watching from a higher point. Steve doesn’t think so, though. Placing it on a branch like that suggests that its main defense is the elements—she was relying on a breeze to knock it over into the brush below or tip it over so the shape and color of the figure wouldn’t be so obvious, but Steve found it before that could happen. 

He tucks the lion into his pack, then takes a few steps towards the lake, tossing his dinosaur into a shrub near the shore. It’s a brightly colored yellow dinosaur (a stegosaurus—they had plates, right?) and the light will filter through the shrub and illuminate it; however, the odds of either of them coming to the lake at exactly the right time to see that is slim and he hasn’t overthought its placement, so he’s solid.

*

Steve stays out in the woods, eating and sleeping and not bathing and _loving it_ , for two days, then heads back to the cabin to replenish his supplies and check on whether the game has been over behind his back. He doesn’t think so, though, since his piece is still in the shrub when he gives it a brief glance on his way back to the cabin.

He’s showered and made himself some coffee when Natasha drags Clint in about an hour later.

“Didn’t take food with me,” Clint sighs as Natasha shoves him into the kitchen and heads straight for the bathroom herself.

“I can make you something,” Steve offers. “Cease game hostilities?”

“Oh yeah, this is neutral ground,” Clint replies. “It’s okay, I’ll grab a bar from—”

“Come on, I was about to make a sandwich the size of all outdoors,” Steve says. “I brought this fancy mustard with me when I came up. When’s the last time you had a fancy mustard sandwich?”

“I’d think you’d gone soft, Cap, with all this talk of fancy mustard, but I still haven’t found your piece out there so... sandwich, please.” Clint pulls out a chair at the little kitchen table by the window and buries his head in his arms.

It’s strange, Steve thinks as he looks at Clint. He moves containers and packages of meats and cheese around for the noise, but he’s looking at Clint. Clint’s gone into full ostrich mode, covering his eyes and letting the rest of his body go: his legs splay out, shoulders sag, hands curl up around his shoulders so his arms block out everything he could possibly see. He trusts this space, trusts Steve in it, and he needs to shut everything out temporarily with something as simple as hiding the world from his sight. 

“I’ll make an extra we can break up and you can take with you back out there, if you’re going to forget to take those energy bars,” Steve says. 

“I had to come in anyway,” Clint says as he shifts, turning his face so he can rest his head on his arms and actually speak to Steve. “It’s Thursday. I’ve got a call-in session with my SHIELD therapist. Might as well get it all out of the way at once, right?”

He’s seen this before. Bucky was this same kind of restless for those few months after Steve got him out of the HYDRA lab. He’d only eat with Steve, drink with Steve, show a glimmer of the guy he used to be when he was with Steve—and then he was gone. 

Thinking of Bucky, of the train, of _gone_ , something tightens in Steve’s chest so he can’t breathe and he needs to work through it, he needs to breathe, he needs to close his eyes—no, he needs to keep them open and focus on what he’s doing, where he’s standing. It passes and after a few long seconds, he looks at Clint again. 

Clint has his eyes open, watching him, seeing everything, so Steve nods and looks back to what he’s doing.

“Yeah, I—I haven’t called in yet to set up something similar. They said I was good only coming in every other week—well, that was before Loki. What kind of cheese do you like?”

Steve doesn’t have to turn to know that Clint’s still staring. Eventually, Clint says, “Whatever you’ve got.”

Natasha comes out again, hair curled and wet against her head. She stops and looks past Steve at the sandwich and whispers, “No cheese on mine.” She takes the chair next to Clint at the table and Steve gives her a _who said this was for you_ smile, which she misses as she rubs her hand on Clint’s back. He turns back to the sandwich for a second and then turns back in time to see Natasha slap Clint on the back, hard. “We’ve _discussed this_ ,” she says. “There’s cheating and then there’s _really cheating_! You can’t _not_ bury your piece!”

“Pirates died with their treasures all the time!” Clint yells. “If anything? I’m more historically accurate than both of you.”

Steve sees Natasha holding up Clint’s plastic stag out of his reach. “He’s had it in the back of his pants this whole time.” She says to Clint, “I’m calling it—you’re out. We’ve spent all this time looking for yours—”

“And you would have _found it_ when you had _found me_ but you _didn’t_ because I’m awesome,” Clint replies.

They look to Steve for a tie-breaker and Steve pretends to think about it.

“I say Clint forfeits this round,” Steve replies. Clint groans and Natasha places the stag in front of him on the table. He swats it to the floor and Steve grabs it. He then goes to where he dropped his pack, unzipping the pouch where he hid Natasha’s piece. “And since neither of you found my piece yet,” he says as he holds up Natasha’s lion, “I think this means I win.”

Natasha looks surprised for a second before she nods and smiles. “It does. Congratulations.”

“Son of a bitch,” Clint says. “All this because Nat _had_ to shove her hand in my pants.”

“You’re such a sore loser,” Natasha laughs.

“We’re playing again the day after tomorrow,” Clint declares.  “And where’s that sandwich? The service in this place is _awful_.” 

Steve puts the animals on the counter and goes back to finishing lunch as Clint and Natasha tell him about past games and the dirtiest cheats they managed on each other while Steve laughs.

*

One night, they sit on the back porch. Clint has a few tools laid out on a cloth at the small table next to him, using them to fix some clearly old arrows and touch up a bow that Steve hasn't seen before. Natasha sits in a rocking chair on the other side, feet up on the railing, reading an old book, one of about a dozen Steve found in the cabin. They're all old, most of them from libraries in towns he hasn't heard of, and all the covers are well-worn, the pages old and crisp. He thinks she's reading _Grimm's Fairy Tales_ , judging from the occasional illustration, but he doesn't ask.

Steve has a book open on his lap, too, but he's sitting on a low bench, sprawled out, closer to Clint because that's where they’ve put the bench. He's staring out into the trees and the sliver of sky above them not obscured by the porch roof, glancing at the people he's with sometimes, listening to the everything and nothing around them. He feels his senses getting sharper every second he sits there with them, with nothing to inform him of his surroundings except what he can gather himself. It’s a refreshing change and he feels it in his bones, muscles, everywhere.

"How often do you come here?" Steve asks, because they haven't been sitting out here for so long that the silence is impenetrable.

"After some missions, and other times, too. Sometimes you need to get away," Clint says. "I'd say it's a few years now since Natasha and I won the place in a game."

"Really? A game?"

Clint looks up and shoots Natasha a grin as he says, "Roulette."

It's really for the best if Steve doesn't ask. 

He leans on his hand and his eyes dart between Clint and Natasha, who are still looking at each other, amused and remembering God _knows_ what. Steve puts his hand down, gripping the arm of the bench a little. 

"I never got to go somewhere like this when I was a kid," Steve says. "Too many allergies, heart troubles, Mom working all the time. I think out here with you guys is my first time out in the real outdoors since the war.”

Natasha opens her mouth to say something, then reconsiders and looks down at her book again. Steve and Clint see it and Clint picks up. "Can't imagine life without the outdoors. I moved a lot as a kid, but this was a constant. We'd always be less than a mile from some really nice trees and forests, the city'd always be a decent distance away, and that's the way I like it."

"Not thinking of moving into Stark Tower, I take it," Steve says. "Tony’s designing floors for all of us, somewhere between all the labs and office space and that penthouse no one uses."

"Still got that Loki-shaped hole in it?" Natasha asks.

“Why would he fix it when he could charge admission for the view and a chance to stand in a Loki-shaped hole?”

“I'll give him that," Clint says. "Knows how to put on a show."

"That's him to a tee."

They sit out there for hours, talking and getting to know each other. Steve can see them filing away information about him, glancing from the mindless activities their hands are occupied with so they can see his expression and body language whenever he says something. He might have been in the military for roughly five minutes compared to these two, but he spent his life, his pre-serum, pre-war, pre-defrosting life gauging people and sizing them up so he could orient and defend himself, and that’s not a habit that he’s going to let go of anytime soon.

Clearly, neither are they.

“You never said what was the final straw,” Clint says. “Why you finally left Stark Palace for our little slice of heaven.”

“Spend a day in Stark Palace and you’d be running for the hills, too,” Steve replies.

“I feel so left out,” Clint sighs. “Since you and Natasha have been so _intimate_ with Tony’s Labyrinth and I can only hear about it.”

Steve laughs to himself, a quiet thing muffled against his hand. His message to Clint had no specifics, just that he was looking to get away from Manhattan for a while and did he know of somewhere he could go instead of taking SHIELD’s offer of a room in an undisclosed bunker somewhere? He’d been thankful that Clint (and, of course, Natasha the silent partner) seemed to understand the need under his skin to get _away_ and _do something_ besides talk to a damn robot all day.

“There’s no place for me in the city anymore,” Steve says after a few moments’ silence. “Bruce and Tony, they’re doing terrific things that will blow us away next time we all get together, but for the life of me, I couldn’t find anything to do.” He sits up and leans back into the bench again, stretching his arm across the back and thinking about whether he should say the next thing aloud or let them figure it out for themselves.

When Steve looks up, Clint is running a cloth over his bow again and Natasha is staring right at Steve.

“No,” Natasha says. “No, of course they couldn’t find a use for you.”

Clint looks up, eyebrow raised, but looks back to his bow that Steve thinks can’t handle another second of polishing but, well, Clint would know better.

“Tony Stark doesn’t need a heart,” Natasha adds. “Just the mechanical process of one. Now he’s found his soulmate brain and he’s had Pepper’s tongue working for him for years.” When Clint laughs under his breath at that, a short little huff of amusement, she shoots him a sharp look but curves her mouth anyway. 

“No,” Steve protests. “Tony cares. He has a heart. He wouldn’t have risked his life for everyone—for the whole city—if he didn’t.” 

“Wrong, Cap,” Natasha says. “Remember that the one time he cared enough to do that was only after _you_ told him he couldn’t, when you pointed out that he was missing a piece. Now he’s complete, so why does he need you?”

It’s all a little too—too metaphorical, too abstract, too impractical for Steve, but Natasha does have a point. The stuff Steve Rogers excels at is stuff that Tony Stark doesn’t care about, stuff Howard Stark didn’t care about, either. Here’s a device, some new technology, a new whoozit that does a new thing, with no real thought to how it would fit into their world. Here, let’s take nearly all the vibranium available to the world and put it into this one device. Let’s become the biggest weapons manufacturer in the world without becoming soldiers for even a second, and let’s not worry about the impact of this business until unspeakable things are done to Tony in a cave. Let’s grab this cube from the bottom of the ocean and poke it until something happens, like billions of dollars of damage in Midtown. Tony doesn’t make weapons anymore, but that doesn’t mean Tony does anything responsibly, either.

Like all of them living together in the same building. How does _that_ makes sense when they are what they are?

“Can’t believe I’m on Stark’s side for once,” Clint says. Natasha looks shocked, too, but only shows it in the slow lift of one of her eyebrows. 

Clint, though, looks uncomfortable. “Just saying,” but he doesn’t actually _say_ anything for a while. He puts his bow down at the side of his chair and goes for one of his fancy arrowheads and a screwdriver, getting to work on taking it apart and laying the pieces out on another cloth at the table next to him. “It’s a good precaution in our line of work,” he says, “If you keep your heart somewhere else, where people can’t get to it. All the better if you can hide it in plain sight and never forget it’s there.”

It’s Natasha who stretches a leg out and quickly kicks the underside of Clint’s boot before retreating back to her seat, all in the span of a second. Clint glances at her and smiles a little, mostly with his eyes, before he looks down at the arrowhead in his hand again.

"Clint's a foot," Natasha says, laughing as much as she ever does. "I'm the brains of this operation, _and_ the tongue, thank you."

"I'm totally the tongue," Clint shoots back and there he goes, touching the tip of his nose with his tongue like it's nothing.

There's a silence, the absence of a third voice. Now there’s only Steve.

Clint's hands still and he looks up, says to her, “We did such a good job, Tasha. We did _so well_ keeping our heart right there in plain sight and making sure no one would ever touch him." He clears his throat and says, "Now what?"

Now what? Steve doesn't know what’s in store for him, and certainly not for them.

*

Clint and Natasha share the bed in the larger bedroom, Clint curled around her out of habit. After everything they’ve seen each other through, they tend to fall asleep like this when they’re together. It started as a way to avoid freezing to death, then as a way to talk and plan in their quietest whispers, and now it’s the closest thing they have to _comfortable_ —at least until Clint falls asleep, Natasha pries Clint’s arm off, and he rolls onto his other side, taking too much of the comforter with him.

“We work well together,” Clint breathes against her jaw and sometimes he speaks so softly that she thinks they’ve finally linked via telepathy so they can become completely unstoppable. “It’s easier to bring a soldier up to date on some technology than to train him to do something else entirely, or—or _be_ something else.”

“I know,” Natasha says, her arm curled under her pillow and most of her words buried against the skin of her inner arm. She knows Clint can hear, though. “I don’t think SHIELD knew what they were doing when they brought him back.”

“Do they ever know?” Clint asks. “Does anyone? SHIELD moves faster than fast, and that’s about all they have going for them.”

“He won’t be as funny over the comms,” Natasha says after a few long moments. “No more pop culture mission code names, either.”

“I know,” Clint says, but the words are buried in her shoulder, his lips pressed against her shoulder blade as he mouths, _I know, I know_ , and rests his forehead against the back of her neck. _I know, I know_ , he whispers aloud, and Natasha can only push back against him, remind him she’s here until he wraps his arm around her waist tighter and drifts off to what passes for sleep these days. 

She stays awake as he breathes against the back of her neck, and she begins to plan.

*

“All right,” Fury sighs. “You say you want to form a new team, the three of you, with Rogers are your handler.”

“Yes,” Steve sighs in relief because Fury _gets it_.

Fury works on his tablet for a few seconds and says, “Rogers, before I hand down a decision, let me offer you some viable opportunities, all right? Hear me out.”

Steve looks at Clint and Natasha, whose mouths are twisted up with blatant skepticism, but he smiles his most encouraging _war bonds help!_ smile at them (to no effect).

“Hear me out,” Fury repeats. “A lecture tour.”

Clint pulls the neck of his t-shirt over his face and _cackles_ , leaning back in his chair to enjoy the show from inside his shirt because oh, why not.

“Agent Barton,” Fury warns.

“Oh, sorry,” Clint says as he pops his head out from his t-shirt again. “The sun got in my eyes for a second.” 

“That’s a real problem for him,” Natasha adds. “Crouching in the New Mexico sun watching a crater for four-hour shifts is no problem, but sitting in your office on an overcast day stings a little.”

“I’m an enigma,” Clint says.

“Sir, was that your only viable opportunity?” Steve interrupts. He’s seen this show before; he knows it could go on for years if he doesn’t interfere.

“No, of course not,” Fury huffs. “How about you get back to art school? Anywhere you want.”

“Hold on, tell him what an MFA is worth these days,” Clint says. “You know, since we’re talking _viability_ and all.”

“Somehow, I managed to forget why I handed you over to a handler the moment we got you, Barton,” Fury replies. “Thanks for the reminder.”

“Director Fury,” Steve says. “Anything else?”

As he goes through his list, Clint and Natasha shoot down every suggestion. Though, even if they weren’t there to provide some real world context (relatively speaking, they know the 21st century much better than he does), Steve would still say no to every single alternative. 

“I want to be a soldier,” Steve says after Clint points out that Fury’s naming professions out of a nursery rhyme ( _rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief_ —even Steve knows that one). “That’s—it’s what—I’m _good_ at it, sir. I’m a _great_ soldier. I’m _great_ at guiding men—people—through the field, getting them all out on the other side—and that’s what I want to do on our team. It’s what I’ll do when the world needs the Avengers back, but until then, I want to catch up and be a good soldier for the 21st century, a good captain to these two.”

That has Fury stop and fold his hands while he takes a long moment to look him over and let all that sink in.

“It’s been _a month_ since the Avengers assembled,” Fury says with all the incredulity he can muster. “A _month_ , all right? Think about where you all were a month ago.” He leans forward with one elbow on his desk and points at them each in turn. “Undercover, living in a time capsule bunker—that _we made for you_ , by the way—and on cube watch before being brainwashed by a demigod.”

“No one said we wanted to return to the field immediately,” Natasha says. “In fact, I’m sure we said the exact opposite. We understand there’s a lot of work required to get us into the field as a team.”

“A month passes awful slow for people with no direction or objective, let alone any hope of one,” Steve adds.

“I got it, Rogers, put the sad violin away,” Fury replies.

“That sounds like a _yes, you can have your team, my gifted, beautiful children_ ,” Clint notes.

“You shut up,” Fury replies as he picks up his phone. “Don’t think that Coulson was the only one with a taser up his sleeve.”

“Mmm, he always did know what I like,” Clint replies.

No one misses the beaming smile he shoots Natasha before he hides it behind his hand, eyes darting to Steve and looking lighter, more pleased than he’s ever seen Clint.

“Get in here, Hill. I’ve got three Avengers who want to send us into logistics _hell_ instead of gracefully vacationing into the sunset.”

“First day of handler training,” Clint stage-whispers to Steve. “They totally murder your sense of empathy. Oh, and your ability to give a _fuck_ about—“

“He’s your c.o., Barton,” Steve says. He’s sharp and, more to the point, he’s _serious_. 

Everyone in the room stills as Clint stares at Steve. After a second, Clint says, “Yeah, Cap. Sorry.” He looks to Fury for a moment, offers him a nod, and says, “Sorry, sir.”

Fury nods and says into his phone, “ _Now_ , Hill. Bring Lopez with you. We’ve got work to do.”


	6. an epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He _swears_ they were more fun when the world might have actually ended.

“For the record,” Tony says when he and Bruce arrive on the Helicarrier’s bridge, “I can’t believe your birthday is the fourth of July, but I also can’t prove tampering—“

“They’re not here yet,” Bruce says as he motions to the devoid-of-other-Avengers bridge. “Can you really not _see people_ while you’re talking out of your ass?”

“Hill’s here,” Tony says as he sidles up to her. “Do you ever uncross your arms, by the way, or are you like Coulson with the whole—yup, there’s that stare. He was much more fun, though.”

“The others should be arriving momentarily,” Hill replies, “If you’d like to wind yourself back up to repeat all that wit for their benefit.”

“Oh, no way. Never go backwards, not even—actually, I have to, because was Steve _really_ born on the fourth of July? Like. How did he manage that?”

“Even the fetal Captain America had more conviction and determination than most people know in a lifetime,” Hill says. 

“You _are_ funny,” Tony marvels.

“What the hell is _that_?” Bruce asks as he walks across the bridge to the observation windows. Tony looks, as does Hill and every junior agent too well-trained to run from their station and stare at whatever the hell landed on the special deck below the windows.

Except Tony thinks he sees what he thinks is a chariot (what). He strolls up behind Bruce, keeping cool even if the curiosity might _literally kill him_ , and rests his chin on Bruce’s shoulder. “Hmm. I believe that’s an intergalactic Asgardian rocket.”

“No kidding, Tony,” Bruce snaps. “But did you notice that Thor’s _chariot_ is being pulled by two elephant-sized goats?”

“I’m sure they’re very realistic mechanical—Thor’s petting his robo-goats. I don’t think he knows that they’re robotic.”

“Frankly, neither do you. What if that’s how big goats are on Asgard? What if they’re bred and trained for intergalactic travel? What then?”

“That’s _awesome_. This means we can hitch a ride to Asgard this time, doesn’t it? Bruce. Let’s go to Asgard. Text Pepper, tell her we’re hitching a ride to another galaxy and she shouldn’t wait up.”

“Yeah, I’ll leave that text to you.”

Thor enters the bridge a few minutes later and rushes his old friends, pulling them into one-on-one bone-crunching hugs that makes Bruce flail a little and then cling like a sad rag doll to Thor’s endless biceps. Tony just says, “Big guy!” and hangs on for the ride.

“So, goats,” Bruce says as he motions to the observation windows. “Intergalactic rocket-goats.”

“We still labor to rebuild the Bifrost, my friends,” Thor replies, “But we are not lost, as Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr are my dearest companions from boyhood!”

“They’re robots, you know that, right?” Tony asks. “I mean, they’re excellent animatronics, but I know machines when I see them.”

“That does not lessen their nobility or my fondness for them,” Thor says. “Tanngnjóstr has even taken a liking to Jane! Though Tanngrisnir, as always, remains temperamental.”

Bruce latches onto the important part: “You took them to _New Mexico_?”

“They love the dry heat if they cannot have the cold summit air of Asgard!”

“Wow. And how’s your murderous little brother?” Tony asks.

“I’ll require much ale before we can discuss Loki,” Thor says, grumbling enough beneath his chestplate to rattle some sensitive instruments and a few junior agents. “But where are our comrades—“

“Friends, they’re friends in this century,” Bruce says.

“Our friends and companions in arms! The captain, the hawk, and the most fearsome—“

“Hear that,” Natasha says as the door to the bridge slides open again and she tosses a glance back at Clint. “I get _adjectives_.”

“Wait until I get those talon implants,” Clint replies. “See if I don’t get adjectives then.”

Tony watches as they come in and instantly begin tussling with the god of thunder who rode in on his intergalactic rocket-goat-powered chariot and _wow, he missed this_. Bruce raises his eyebrows at Tony and steps aside before they get out of hand and he gets a face-full of assassin thrown at him.

“All right, all right,” Fury calls out as he arrives on the bridge. “Enough with the roughhousing, we just got these upgrades.”

“Come on, everyone, we’re all here,” Steve says as he appears next to Fury, “We’ve got lots to review—“

“Holy shit what is that jumpsuit,” Tony spits out when he sees Steve. Steve looks at him with his disapproving Captain America stare, so Tony has to look around the bridge for some answers/support. 

Except, all he can find are the junior agents who, Tony notices, are _staring_ like Steve’s the last drink of water they’re ever going to have.

“Yeah, yeah, we got the band back together,” Fury says when he’s taken his place among the monitors at the center of the bridge. “Memorabilia’s in the gift shop.”

“Wait, there’s a gift shop?” Tony asks. “Pepper needs more T-shirts with my face on them.”

“No she doesn’t,” everyone, including Hill, replies.

“It’s a little game we play with the new agents,” Steve says as he loads the conference table’s displays with the presentation on their latest threat. “Sending them to the gift shop.”

“Glad to see you’re so casual about it now, Rogers,” Hill notes, “After those three hours you spent looking for it around HQ.”

“A gift shop is a good idea, okay,” Steve grumbles. He leans back in his chair enough for it to creak and everyone takes that as a cue to sit, for real this time. Tony shoves Clint out of the way so he can sit next to Steve because he still thinks he imagined his favorite Capsicle working on these monitors like he’d always known them. He needs more data and he needs to be leaning on the arm of his chair, inches away from Steve, to make sure this isn’t a very convincing hologram or a Steve-shaped suit for Coulson to hide in or something. 

( _Come on_. It’s been eight months, they still haven’t had a Phil-specific memorial service, and if Coulson could fake his death and come back as anyone, wouldn’t he choose a super-bureaucratic Captain America? Exactly. It’s the only way it would make the paperwork and the stilts required worth it.)

(Yeah, the stages of grief don’t _usually_ run from anger to bargaining, sadness, acceptance, more anger, and finally to denial, but since when is Tony usual at all?)

“So what we’re seeing is a sharp rise in anti-Avengers groups,” Steve begins. “It’s almost a year on from the situation in New York—”

“The situation, is it? Spoken like a true bureaucrat,” Tony replies.

No one laughs. He _swears_ they were more fun when the world might have actually ended.

“It’s been almost a year,” Steve repeats, “And the rebuilding efforts are coming along slower than people would like, so we’ve expected a rise in vigilante behavior. Once we received reports that Thor had returned to Earth for unrelated reasons, we thought it a good opportunity to address some of the more pressing intel we’ve received, and that’s where the Revengers come in.”

“Are you kidding?” Tony laughs as he puts his phone away and looks at the tabletop display.

“We’ve come to use _Revengers_ as a general term for these vigilante groups,” Steve explains. “Since, well. Since so many of them are run by the less creative types who can’t come up with better names.”

Tony leans back in his chair to see if there’s some kind of SHIELD bureaucrat module implanted somewhere in Steve’s neck or head because he’d heard of the handler-track training Clint and Natasha had dragged him into, but it’s still a little much to be believed.

“Tony, this concerns you,” Steve says as he catches Tony staring at the back of his head and motions to the monitor in front of him. 

“Right, right,” Tony says as he looks. “Hold on, I know that guy. You know, vaguely. As much as I know most people. Oh, there it is. Senior researcher at Stark Industries, California.”

“Right,” Steve says. “Of the vigilante groups we’ve classified as Revengers, we’re tackling one group in particular because it’s comprised of former Stark Industries employees. We also have some intel that suggests they may be planning something in the next few days, possible joint attacks based out of New York and D.C.”

“You have that new building opening in D.C. next week, don’t you?” Clint asks. 

Tony sighs, looks up at the ceiling and remembers Pepper’s longer-than-usual hours for the past few weeks, and a fight they had about—yeah, it might have been these guys making their presence known? He looks at Bruce, who’s flipping through personnel profiles instead of judging him, which is nice. 

“Pepper’s always been on me to spend more on professional development and, yeah, okay, she might be right about that,” Tony considers.

“We were hoping you’d be able to identify this,” Steve says as he brings up the schematics for a launcher that makes Tony roll his eyes.

“Now I remember this guy and his design,” he says. “One of the few people that I’ve _personally fired_ because he decided the best response to our tabling his life’s work of this _one project_ was to yell at me outside my car and generally seem like the kind of unbalanced person who needs to not be around mechanized weapons and the resources to make them, uh, ever again.” Tony holds up his hands and says, “Not that we _make_ weapons anymore, I’m saying that it’s been hard for some of our designers to get over the impulse to design weapons, so we let them go.”

“Well, it looks like they’ve all gotten together to show you what’s what,” Natasha says. “How can you help us avoid the worst case scenario where they level a city?”

“It’s okay, these are all deeply flawed designs for weapons I’ve already made so let’s go through them and find all the weak spots,” Tony says. “In most cases, a good bash to the tail-end of a projectile’s barrel should be enough to put it out of commission without damaging whatever reactive core’s inside because the materials to make the best versions of these things aren’t available outside of our plants.”

“It also helps that these supervillains all look like accounting nerds,” Clint notes as he flips through the person profiles. “So if Meowmeow can’t bash a rocket down, a punch to the face or a wedgie should do it.”

“You really need to stop watching _Saved by the Bell_ ,” Natasha notes. 

“Not before I see Kelly and Zack get married,” Clint replies. “Those kids have been through so many upper middle class white kid problems. Don’t they deserve a little happiness?”

Bruce taps Tony’s shoulder and he focuses instantly on annotating every set of blueprints submitted by these “Revengers” while they were at Stark Industries, finding weaknesses and vulnerable spots to avoid so they can minimize the collateral damage when they take these weapons out. 

He looks up after they’ve gone through a dozen because Thor interrupted his, Clint, and Natasha’s group work when he launched into an engrossing account of the (Asgardian) Lifetime movie someone created based on him and Loki, which itself is an adaptation of a recent, extremely popular oral epic that encompasses the centuries of their family or whatever.

“The All-father advised we not fight them and their dramatizing, as the story they have created... it paints Loki in a more favorable light than his true behavior,” Thor says. The way Thor says that, Tony thinks he’s not sure of Thor’s actual _age_ , but he sounds ancient, like a pharaoh’s tomb being wrenched open for the first time in centuries. It’s like he’s hungover from _existing_ —a feeling Tony thought he knew, but that’s nothing when multiplied times the millennia Thor has lived on Asgard.

Tony turns back to what he, Bruce and Steve are working on, but strains to listen when Natasha asks Thor in her quietest voice, “And have you spoken to him since you got back?”

“To Loki, yes, unfortunately,” Thor replies. “To my brother? But once, when the—when this production was _broadcast_ , as you say, across Asgard, my brother did smile behind his mask, reminding me of when we stole our father’s horse and rode it for five nights across our many lands, as many as we could cover before we were found.” Thor sits up straight, shoulders back and refusing to slouch for a second more, and he points to the monitor in front of Natasha. “We must find these men’s weaknesses. I do not recognize the names for many of your human ailments. You should tell me what they are, or I would do them more damage than they deserve.”

Thor didn’t intend it, but Tony feels like more of a little shit than he has in a good long time, so he redoubles his efforts and focuses, because. Just because. So Thor can get back to Jane and feel something good, so he can get back to Asgard and keep picking up the pieces of his family and kingdom—so _Tony_ can go home and pull Pepper, Bruce, and Happy into a group hug that crushes all their little nerd bones. 

It takes another half-hour, but they have the bare bones of a game plan developed, more intel to gather, the possible remote tracking of any of the components, on-the-ground location scouting in D.C. for likely storehouses—out of his peripheral vision, Tony can see Fury giving Hill an impressed look, probably pleased that all they had to do was host this shindig while the rest could almost take care of itself.

Almost.

“And, final question, please recognize Stark from Long Island,” Tony says as he raises his hand and waves it in Steve’s face until Steve swats it away. “Cap, are you suiting up with us? Or does your new special handler status mean, you know, there’s going to be a bidding war for all your stuff between museums?”

“Captain, you must,” Thor adds. “You are a rare commander, one who can fight with his troops as well as he leads them. You cannot scorn such a gift as yours.”

Steve’s expression softens as he switches from badass handler into Steve Rogers, their too-good, too-sweet buddy who still really likes watching _The Sound of Music_ , according to semi-reliable sources (i.e., spies who spy).

“Of course I will,” Steve says. “We’re the Avengers, aren’t we?”


	7. day trips with bruce and pepper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One day every month, Bruce and Pepper run away together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A post-credits scene!

One day every month, Bruce and Pepper run away together.

*

Once, Pepper has to meet with some television council and the city of Vancouver, who wanted to commission another clean energy studio to accommodate more film projects. She and Bruce fly over with the experts who actually knew a thing or two about the viability of the project. She does her thing for a few hours and then they spend the next day together, just the two of them. 

Bruce uses all his shyness to charm his way into using the telescope at the planetarium. The _esteemed_ Dr. Bruce Banner wants to show his friend a planet or two while they’re in a prime spot like this—do they really want to upset him by refusing such a small request?

“Tell me what I’m looking at,” Pepper says as she sits at the telescope. “This is... it’s more stars than I know what to do with,” she marvels.

“She’s from the city,” Bruce explains to the one astronomer who stayed.

Pepper lightly jabs him with her heel, then turns back to the telescope and doesn’t stop asking questions.

*

Another time, Pepper and Bruce offer to fly out to Malibu when Tony realized he had left behind in his workshop some very important homemade components that he needed.

Most of the house has been restored since Tony’s disastrous birthday years before, so Pepper shows Bruce around and fills in her and Tony’s past as they go.

“And this is the living room,” she says. “That used to be a bar. Tony put a DJ there, got completely wasted, and started skeet shooting bottles of booze his guests threw up into the air.” 

(She has a cluster of scars on her right shoulder from that night when _everything_ glass in the house exploded; one explosion in particular during Tony and Rhodey’s shootout dug shards into her skin, a spot where Happy couldn’t cover her. Everyone’s seen the scars. Everyone who counts.)

(That includes Bruce.)

She shows Bruce the workshop. Tony left the homemade particle accelerator in place because, according to him, creating a new element was fun and he might want to do it again soon.

“Tony used to have... sort of a modified barber’s chair here and when he first got back from Afghanistan, he asked me to change out the entire reactor for a new one.”

“Like... pull it out of his...”

“And plug the new one into the base plate grafted onto his sternum. It was disgusting.”

“Well, if that’s not love...”

“We weren’t even _dating_!” Pepper laughs. “He’s an HR nightmare.”

“Makes me glad I’m a researcher, I’ll tell you that much.”

“I’m not sure that would have saved you, if being his clueless assistant didn’t save me.”

“You, clueless,” Bruce scoffs, so sincere, so real.

They drag a couch out to the balcony that overlooks the ocean and spend all night sitting outside, eating Mexican food and drinking whatever alcohol’s in the house. Pepper wakes up the next day clutching Bruce’s hand in her lap and with a hangover that threatens to raze the entire city of Malibu if she doesn’t get some water and ibuprofen in her body immediately.

It’s a good trip.

*

Another time, Pepper has killer cramps and takes a sick day, so Bruce does, too. 

Tony crawls into bed with them and curls up against Pepper’s back. He whines, “You never take sick days for me.”

“I took this day for my _uterus_ , not for Bruce and not for you,” she replies.

“A likely story,” Bruce says.

“Sir, Captain Rogers and Agents Barton and Romanoff have arrived,” JARVIS announces.

“Well that’s fine and dandy because me and the snipers three are going to the tower so they can check out their floors. So, _ha_ ,” Tony says.

“Why couldn’t they have met you there?” Pepper asks. 

“Because Steve is a _nightmare_ now that he has a purpose in life, and this week that purpose is to make sure we’re all super healthy and up to SHIELD’s standards of agent fitness. So, we’re all running to the tower. Like jogging, but faster. Clint and Natasha said something about their shoes that have little daggers that come out of the toes—SHIELD’s full of lying liars, but I’m really curious? Yeah, all this and I’m just a consultant.”

“That sounds like them,” Bruce sighs. “Go away, you’re talking too much.”

“Bye, sad sacks. Happy’s picking you up for dinner at seven since the Captain and his Tennilles are shipping out tomorrow for exotic and deadly locales.”

He leans over and kisses Pepper on her sweaty temple and matted hair, and leans over even further to do the same to Bruce before he runs off, closing the door behind him. 

“He wasn’t even dressed to run,” Pepper says as she pulls the comforter over her head.

“Yeah, no one’s going _running_ today, but he’s probably getting stabbed with a pair of shoes.”

They laugh at awful morning shows and grudgingly admit a recipe on _The Chew_ might be worth making sometime when they have a whole hour to prepare food and eat it. Pepper wonders if her Midol causes mental disorders because she’s taking cooking advice from daytime television and everything about that feels _wrong_. Bruce strokes her hair as she nods off somewhere in hour 19 of _The Today Show_. 

When she wakes up again with dry mouth and feeling completely gross, she asks Bruce about Betty.

Actually, she asks if he’s ever been like this before, with anyone, playing the supportive boyfriend, because she can’t really picture it, and he tells her about Betty.

He tells her how they got together, how they didn’t work, how they tried to work through their issues, how that didn’t matter once the accident happened, how he hasn’t thought about anyone like her since—

“Until you guys,” he says, so quiet that Pepper almost thinks he didn’t say it.

“How come?” she asks. “The other guy?”

“Just me,” Bruce says, staring right into her eyes, disarming her completely. This has to be some kind of fever dream. How else can they go this long staring at each other? “I didn’t treat her well, not like she wanted to be treated.”

Bruce lifts his hand and rests it on the side of her face; Pepper closes her eyes, his hand so cool against her cheek. He runs his thumb over her cheekbone and she opens her eyes; sometimes she thinks she can see it in his face, the way every awful feeling he has simmers below the surface, try as he might to keep his voice soothing and low, his expression gentle. She wants to tell him that she gets it. She knows what it’s like to have every good feeling weighed down at the edges with reality and disappointment that it’s not better, that it didn’t come sooner, or any of a thousand other things. 

He says, “You and Tony, Tony and me, me and you—we’re mean, selfish, damaged, obnoxious, overworked, demanding—and we thrive. We’re good like that, aren’t we?”

“Of course we are, you stupid dickhead,” Pepper replies. She kisses his forehead and rests her head against him for a long moment, then gets out of bed when Bruce sleeps, finally.

*

Today, they’re visiting a couple of museums. They’re not museum-hopping, not by a long shot, so they have the whole day to linger and explore at their own pace. 

They start at the Met so Bruce can see the redesigned Greek and Roman exhibition spaces since when they first reopened, Bruce was a little busy escaping to South America. They hang out in the atrium in front of the bank facade of the American wing, where they discover it’s their favorite spot in the museum.

After that, Pepper takes Bruce’s arm, checks her comfortable flats, and they walk across Central Park to the Museum of Natural History. It’s flooded with kids, of course, because it’s a weekday, and she feels Bruce tense under her hand. He’s somehow never been to this museum at all, so she takes him to the planetarium for a mind-numbing (to a scientist) movie about the origins of the universe to ease him into everything.

Eventually, they end up in the Hall of Oceanic Life, sitting on one of the long benches under the blue whale model. They sit there for a few long minutes, watching the video in front of them, surrounded by shrieking kids and chatty moms, and it takes that long for Pepper to look up at the whale and laugh.

“It scares you, too, doesn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t say scared,” Bruce replies, “But I’m glad you did because that’s pretty accurate.”

Pepper gets up and leads him to the back of the hall’s ground floor dioramas: the tiger sharks chasing a sea turtle, the squid and the whale, the lower level of the coral reef—and that’s when Bruce relaxes. She smiles to herself and looks around, only to find herself staring at the man on her other side, who has Phil Coulson’s profile and his taste in suits.

The guy turns to face her and says, “Hi, Pepper. It’s Phil. Agent Phil Coulson from SHIELD.”

“I remember,” Pepper says, as if she could ever forget. She clutches a little harder at Bruce’s arm until he turns to look.

Bruce stares for a long time before he says, “Hi there.”

Phil offers Bruce a quick smile, then a wider one for Pepper before he asks, “Can we catch up somewhere?”

“Bruce has a private lab in the mansion,” Pepper replies. “Let’s go there.” Phil nods and the three of them leave the hall together. Pepper adds, “On the way, let’s talk about the ways everyone will murder you once they find out you’re not dead.”

“Sure, but they know not use scepters this time, right?” Phil asks. “Since we know they don’t take.”


	8. Extended/Deleted Scenes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So, three months on, I was cleaning up and organizing some things in Scrivener and found the file I kept of deleted chunks of this story. I decided to post them because they don't change the plot of the story, but expand on existing scenes and make a few things a little clearer, like the tensions between Steve and Tony before Steve packed up and left.
> 
> Mostly, though, this is a lot of ridiculous banter that I had to cut because it was derailing the momentum of a particular scene. Hope you enjoy!

**Navigation**

  * Extended Prologue (Bruce/Tony) (from [Bethesda](../705165))
  * Tony narration (from [if he only had a brain](../705207))
  * Welcome to Steve (from [inside the walls of the heart](../707646), along with the rest)
  * Meeting Jarvis 
  * The Sketchbook Saga, v.1
  * The Sketchbook Saga, v.2
  * Alternate Message from Clint
  * Steve Leaves
  * Alternate Cabin Scenes 
  * Alternate Scene with Fury



[EXTENDED PROLOGUE]

 

> **A/N:**  Bruce, Tony? Stop trying so hard to impress each other. WE GET IT. YOU'RE SUPER COOL GUYS. GET A ROOM ALREADY.

"We’re going to IKEA, buddy," Tony replies. "We’re working at Stark Tower, but we’re _living_ at Stark Mansion."

“You’d think your family has been rich enough for _long_ enough to warrant some weird names on all your buildings. Xanadu’s a cliche, but you could spin it into a classic."

"Yeah, except that was based on the Hearst Castle, so I’m sorry to say that the rich and famous aren’t really known for their creativity and shit. Just for you, Bruce, I’ll think of something fun. And you can name your suite in the _Stark Mansion_ whatever you want."

"Rageopolis," Bruce says. "Land of My Blinding Fury."

"That last one sounds like a weepy boyband," Tony replies. “Desired effect?”

"It wasn’t, but thanks," Bruce laughs. Tony glances over for a second to watch him laugh because he kind of loves it, the way he laughs with his whole diaphragm, with his whole chest and body, throwing his head back and basking in it like it’s the best feeling in the world. Maybe every laugh is precious to their Dr. Banner—lucky for him, he’s stuck with Tony for a while and Tony’s the funniest person Tony knows.

"Also," Bruce says. "IKEA? You mean Stark hasn’t branched out into the discount furniture business?"

"Well, when we stopped making weapons, we stopped going after the government’s bomb-in-a-potted-plant contract, and without the plant-bomb money, there didn’t seem to be much of a demand for a whole exploding living room to go with it, you know?"

"And life without an exploding chaise lounge, what’s the point of that, am I right?" 

"Don’t worry, buddy, I’d be happy to plant some land mines in the gardens if you miss the third world that much."

"Asshole."

Tony starts playing music and taps his hands excitedly on the wheel when the song that comes up is "California Love."

"Now you’re just trying to start shit," Bruce laughs. "You remember we’re in New York, right? According to all these real tall buildings, I mean."

"A state that’s untouchable like Elliot Ness," Tony sings along.

"Semi-related: didn’t I see a video of you on YouTube—"

"Yes, you did, and I think it’s a testament to Tupac, bless him, that this was playing at one of the lowest points in my life and I still think it’s catchy as hell.” He pulls the car out of the spot and says, "I hope Steve enjoys the subroutine I put in his phone’s music player that has this song come up at least once every 3 hours."

"And you think that Captain America needs to sing this on his motorcycle trip across America."

"Uh, don’t _you_?"

*

[TONY NARRATION]

God, what a fucking fucked up life he’s lived, the shame flushing into his face in the moment before Bruce speaks. One day, he thinks he’ll teach himself neurobiology, figure out why the brain works the way it does—why he can be fine one moment, having a conversation like it’s nothing, and why any word, any look, anything or nothing really, can reach into the deepest shame-filled recesses of his twisted mess of a history and pull up something so humiliating that it paralyzes him. Tony thinks ( _knows_ ) that they’re all imperfect machines, the sum of cheap, broken, abused parts collected in the scrapyards of the world, so of course they’re bound to stutter and break down along the way. 

*

[WELCOME TO STEVE]

 

> **A/N:** So it took _a lot_ of drafts for me to be satisfied with the opening to [Steve's chapter](../707646) where Tony, Pepper and Bruce greet him at the door and Tony proceeds to bombard Steve with more talking than anyone should ever hear. Here's the sixty or so alternate chunks of dialogue that showcase more of Tony's complete insanity and what he thinks of Neil DeGrasse Tyson. (You wanted to know, right?)

Tony lets Steve get one foot into the mansion before he yells, “WAIT A SECOND, WHAT?”

“Yeah, what happened to your great American road trip?” Bruce asks.

“Leave him alone, you _vultures_ ,” Pepper says as she rests a hand on Steve’s shoulder and leads him through the foyer and towards the living room. “Put your bag down, take off your shoes, stay a while.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Steve replies. “And hi again, guys.”

“Hi,” Tony says. “What are you doing here?”

“How about you offer your guest a drink before you interrogate him?” Pepper asks.

“Then we can interrogate him?” Tony asks. “Everyone heard that, witnesses, I get to interrogate him!”

“Is this what he’s like when he’s happy?” Steve asks as he watches Tony walk away. “I’m not sure I like it.”

“Hey,” Tony says, mocking hurt but also maybe not? He’s not sure, exactly. Tony opens the fridge and stares inside. He genuinely has no idea what Captain America drinks, or what Steve Rogers drinks. Wait, Captain America had a song about calcium back in the day, didn’t he? No, it was a TV song so it had to be one of the knockoffs he and the rest of the kids in the country watched in a half-hearted attempt to keep the Captain America role alive, even if the real guy was—

Yup, sitting in his living room right now.

“Water, beer, soda, juice, smoothie, all of them?” Tony calls out.

He hears mumbling and Steve says, quietly amused, “Yeah, I finally went to a real gym, a modern one, and they had _green smoothies_. Those were great. But it’s Tony so he probably means something not-healthy, right?”

“Excuse you,” Tony says as he walks back into the living room. “I’ll have you know I spent _months_ drinking chlorophyll, like, lots of it. I’m pretty healthy, thanks.”

Pepper smiles her particularly murderous smile and turns to Steve, taking his hand as she says, “Later, ask me about the time Tony was dying of radiation poisoning and hid it from me for months.”

Steve gives her his sweetest, most innocuous smile and pats her hand because what else is he going to do? 

“Everyone gets smoothies!” Tony declares. “Don’t talk about anything fun until I’m back.”

*

Twenty minutes later, Tony puts a smoothie down in front of Steve just as he’s saying, “And I think they worshipped me as their god?”

“What did I say!” Tony yells. “About fun! Well, but I guess you as a god wouldn’t be as fun as, say, Thor as a god. Thor’s such a great god. If I believed in any god, it’d be Thor.”

Steve looks pained as he takes the smoothie, watching Tony as he drinks it, judging him as hard as he can.

“Cheers, buddy,” Tony adds.

“I was telling Pepper and Dr. Banner that my bike broke down somewhere in Virginia in this really tiny town,” Steve begins. “They recognized me, treated me nice, but they wouldn’t fix my bike. They kept me there for a few days. I mean, they were so nice: they invited me out lots, gave me a place to stay, but kept coming by to ask me for advice, if I could do things for them. They really thought I had superpowers.”

“Well… you do,” Bruce points out. “But I get what you mean.”

*

“Okay, that’s swell and all, blah blah blah Hill is a real girl after all,” Tony says once he hears Steve’s whole story, “But you’re saying some Virginians  _worshiped you as a god_? Where’s this town and are they still interested in rent-a-god? How has Stark Industries  _not_  branched into the religion business yet? I mean, we’ve got the iconography down pat so how hard can it be to have some interns whip up a gospel or four?”

Pepper rests a hand on Steve’s shoulder and does her best to murder Tony with her eyes but bitch, please, he is literally  _bulletproof_  except when he’s not like right now. Shit.

“I think I saw an episode of  _Star Trek_ like that,” Bruce says.

“Oh my God, did you know that humans walked on the moon?” Tony asks Steve. “Did anyone tell you that?”

“All right,” Pepper announces. “Tough love has no greater advocate than me, but seeing as Steve has had about three strokes in rapid succession thanks to your not-helpful knowledge bombs, I’m intervening.”

“I’m not—I don’t want to be sheltered,” Steve says. “I—”

“Do you want a pizza?” Bruce asks.

“That’s a start,” he says.

Bruce leads Steve back to the kitchen so they can talk and order as much food as his super-metabolism requires, but Pepper takes Tony’s hand before he can follow.

“You’re going to ask him to stay, aren’t you?” Pepper asks.

“I thought you already—didn’t we ask him to? Didn’t we move his stuff in while he wasn’t looking? Hasn’t he been living here already?” 

He’s getting too, well, too everything, because that line between Pepper’s eyebrows has appeared and he puts both hands on her arms, then her waist so she doesn’t push him off because he’s trying to hold her down. (Which he’s  _not_ , he’s—he’s not, okay?)

“You’ve seen those safe houses, it’s really just code for bedbug-infested shithole and—“

“And we can’t have Captain America living in a slum or, God forbid,  _Brooklyn_ ,” Tony sighs.

Pepper sighs hard, at which point he remembers: she got off a plane about two hours ago, having spent three days in awful high-altitude Denver, hobnobbing with assholes from Andover who hate him like  _Doctah Haaaapaaaaah_  of the Boston Fucksaws, and hadn’t they just agreed to some kind of polyamorous  _thing_  with Bruce about 30 minutes ago? 

That is a lot of bullshit for someone to handle, even Pepper.

“Okay, okay, sorry, I’ll stop. What do you need me to do? You can leave me and Bruce to take care of him while you unwind, just tell me what to do,” Tony says.

Pepper stares at him hard for a moment and says, “Tony. Remember when I opened the door and said,  _Oh wow, nice to meet you, Captain Rogers_? That’s literally the  _only time_  I’ve ever spoken to him! You just saved the world with him last week—you’re the one who should be telling me what to say!”

“Ummm that’s not how it works though, because if you’ll recall—“

“Honestly, how do you even bring up something like the moon landing?” Pepper muses to herself. “By the way, we landed on the moon? Yes, the one in the sky.”

“More like, by the way, we landed on the moon and since then we’ve succeeded in stranding billions of dollars of equipment on the surface of Mars but not much else,” Tony replies.

“Please, NASA politics later.”

“Ooh, I’ll invite Neil Tyson over for dinner,” Tony says. “He will owe me so many favors if I tell him that he gets to teach Captain fucking America—“

“Don’t call me that,” Steve calls from two rooms away, god _damn_  his super senses.

“—About everything he’s missed in the past seven decades of space exploration.”

“That’s a priority for you?” Pepper asks. “Asking your buddy to come over—“

“Well, first we’re going to watch every movie he’s missed, like  _Animal House_  and  _The Godfather_  because what more do you need in the world, I mean really?”

“Yup, you’re right,” Pepper says. “I need to step away from this and if he wants some  _sanity_  away from you and Bruce, he should come to my room.”

“Our room.”

“My office.”

“Right, right, that one.”

“Just.” Tony watches her think but his mind is moving too fast, so excited at the prospect of this fresh, pink superbrain that he and Bruce will get to pickle within an inch of its  _life_ with everything the Capsicle needs to know—

Except then what?

He slows down and taps on the hard surface of his reactor. Pepper looks at it, then at him, but neither of them are quite sure what to say about the situation, how to advise each other, never mind how to  _act_. 

“Bruce is the smart one,” Tony says. “Start with pizza, go from there? Did you know they didn’t even show him digital screens at first? He’s carrying around in his pockets his first two smartphones  _ever_ , and I don’t even know if he has an email address. I thought they didn’t let you live on this planet without an email address.”

“Well, Steve got himself from the backwoods of Virginia to Manhattan without an email address, so maybe it’s time you re-evaluate your criteria for life as you know it,” Pepper says.

“I love it,” Tony says, and he has to repeat  _love it_  with all the weight he can manage on the L, on  _love_ , as he leans in and kisses Pepper. “I  _love it_  when you talk science to me.”

Honest to Newton himself, she blushes, ducks down so she can kiss his jaw and extricate herself from Tony’s arms and head to the kitchen. He follows just in time to hear Steve talking about this  _green smoothie_. Great! Start with smoothies, continue with movies, end with the moon landing and the collapse of the financial system: he’ll be in the 21 st century in no time!

*

[MEETING JARVIS]

> **A/N:** This begins a couple of sections where Tony and Bruce attempt to teach Steve about technology. Part of THE SKETCHBOOK SAGA because, well.

Tony and Bruce sit at the kitchen island for a very long time, not talking except in half-formed sentences that they complete for each other every few minutes. Nothing they say makes a lot of sense to Steve, so he stops listening. Steve watches them, though, and eats a couple of slices from all these pizzas they ordered. He considers each kind carefully, and this one with ham and pineapple tastes terrific and strange. 

Cheese tastes better now, he thinks. Or maybe he had really missed cheese.

Tony starts tapping his fingers on the table and Steve combines the leftover slices together into a few boxes so they fit in the fridge. Actually, he could probably shove all the boxes in there with room to spare, but that seems rude.

Steve sits at the kitchen island again and wonders how much longer he’ll give himself before he leaves and reads a book. Maybe he could find a sketchpad. He hasn’t tried really sketching since he woke up. He hopes it’s like riding a bike.

“Do you have any paper here?” Steve asks.

“…paper?” Tony asks. “I… don’t know.” Tony folds his arms over his chest and looks at Bruce. “Paper. Seen any? I haven’t. I think.” Tony sighs and as he says, “JARVIS,” he yelps and covers his mouth with both hands. 

“Are you all right?” Steve asks. It looks like he’s choking so he’s about to lean forward and hit Tony on the back, but Tony jumps off the tall kitchen stool and paces around the kitchen. 

“No, no, I’m—I’m just so _stupid_ , I’m the stupidest person who’s ever stupidly lived, stupid stupid—JARVIS!”

“Sir?” a voice calls out and no, no, it sounds like Falsworth, what?

“The education of Captain Steve Rogers,” Tony announces. “Steve, meet JARVIS. JARVIS, create a user profile for Steve, alias Captain Rogers, alias Captain America, alias Cap, alias Capsicle, alias Rogers, alias El Capitan, alias the Star Spangled Man, alias—“

“I get it, you’re never going to call me by my real name,” Steve sighs. “Where’s JARVIS?”

“JARVIS is everywhere,” Bruce replies, not as proud or impressed as Tony would sound if he were answering. “JARVIS is in everything.”

“JARVIS,” says the voice, “is Just A Rather Very Intelligent System. Tony Stark created my earliest prototype in 1992. My personality profile is based on—“

“All right, that’s enough,” Tony interrupts. He puts his hand on Steve’s shoulder and he seems confused about where to look, like there’s too much information everywhere and he needs all of it in his face immediately, but that doesn’t make any sense, does it? “So. I’ve introduced you to JARVIS. You’ve actually already met, a little bit, since he also runs the phone I gave you in the park.”

“I only used it to make the one call,” Steve admits. “I—Agent Hill told me I could do a lot more, but—“

“JARVIS is like my second brain,” Tony explains. “You’ll find a lot of online debates about my most important creation but I can tell you, without a doubt, that it’s JARVIS. I couldn’t have made Iron Man without JARVIS. I can’t _use_ Iron Man without JARVIS.”

“You can’t wake up in the morning without JARVIS,” Bruce points out. “All lower functions are relegated to JARVIS.”

“My real brain, here, in the skullbox,” Tony says as Steve silently mouths _what_ during this explanation that explains nothing at all, “Holds lots of things, math things, design things, ideas, physics and mechanics and things, but JARVIS helps me turn it all into real stuff. It’s a little scary how much he can do and how much he does for me.”

“For better and for worse,” Bruce says.

“What’s this got to do with me?” Steve asks.

“ _Well_ , JARVIS is going to introduce you to the 21st century,” Tony replies. “He’ll keep track of things you should watch and listen to, places you want to go, things you want to do—he’s a secretary and a friend and pretty much everything you’ll ever need.”

And Steve agrees to give JARVIS a shot at introducing him to this new world, but it’s not without a little sadness that Tony’s most trusted friend is a voice he can’t see.

*

[THE SKETCHBOOK SAGA v.1]

 

> **A/N:** This is several versions of the same "teaching Steve technology theme" and all the different ways they played out. Ultimately cut because it was too much Steve and Tony irrevocably butting heads and stubbornness that couldn't be resolved without extending the story much further than I wanted it to go.

“Well, that was painful,” Tony sighs. “I felt the shrapnel inch nearer just watching that.”

“He’s still got a 26-year-old fact-and-skill absorbing brain, made even better by the serum, so he’ll be an expert in no time,” Bruce replies.

“Really?” Steve asks.

“What do kids even use to learn how to type these days?” Tony asks, ignoring Steve’s question. “I feel like they’re just born with a Blackberry in their hands. Like, I don’t even know if JARVIS has anything like typing software built into him. Is Mavis Beacon still around? Steve! Search for it! It’s time you learned about Amazon, but be careful because—“

“Wait, what,” Steve says as he leans closer to the screen. Bruce rests a hand on his shoulder and gently pulls him back “I can buy… anything? Is this for  _everyone_?”

“I’ll just call Ms. Beacon and get something sent over,” Tony sighs as he leaves the room.

Steve files that away for later and looks to Bruce, who hasn’t thrown up his hands and left yet. “Could you show me how to—I’d like to buy some art things? Paper, some pencils, that sort of thing?”

“Need a credit card for that,” Bruce says, “I’ve been living off the grid for a few years now, so I don’t have one. Let’s see if there’s an art store in the neighborhood and we can walk there.”

“Wait,” Tony says as he wanders back into the doorway, phone to his ear. “Are you bringing paper in this house? Bruce, you are  _ruining_  our baby. I can’t even look at you right now.”

“If he wants to draw—“

“We have about ten  _billion_ tablets in my back pocket alone, and that computer—“

“It’s not the  _same_ , Tony—“

“And it’ll never  _be_  the same, will it?”

“Here’s the thing, you think that—“

Steve leans on his hand and stares. He’s suddenly back in Brooklyn, back at home, trying to listen to his favorite show while Mr. and Mrs. Farrell next door fought and he could hear everything through the thin walls. 

This is even better, though, because he’s a grown man and two geniuses are arguing over whether he has the right to buy a sketchpad.

*

They do this thing where they talk about Steve like he’s not there while he’s right in front of them.

He warns them:

“I’ve got a hang of the typing thing,” Steve says one afternoon. He’s at Stark Tower to see what it’s like, since he only got to see five whole minutes of it that time the world almost ended. Suddenly, something brand new and awful that Steve  _absolutely needs_  to survive life as they know it comes up, but Steve’s not interested. “I went and bought some art supplies I wanted. I’ve watched your movies and your TV shows, and JARVIS helped me get some things  _I_ wanted to watch while you guys weren’t around.”

“Okay but—“

“And I’m texting! I sent  _six_  messages yesterday! That’s  _a lot_. I think I’m doing okay. You can suggest things, all right? But you can’t make me do anything, Tony.” He pauses and adds, “Same to you, Bruce. You’re both smart guys but—jeez, haven’t you heard of a little thing called  _need to know basis_?”

“If we sat around with our thumbs up our asses waiting around for anyone to tell us anything,” Tony begins, thinking that leaving it open-ended like that lets the consequences speak for themselves. “You saw how well that worked last time.”

“You’re right,” Steve says, “But you’re wrong, too.”

“Well, fine,” Tony snaps, “If you think so, but I’ve got to get back to redesigning your floor of Stark Tower, all right, so come by when you’re ready to apologize and tell me what kind of equipment you want in there. Gym, science lab, speakeasy, museum of fossils no one gives a shit about it—they can all be yours!”

Steve leaves, but he doesn’t go to Tony’s workshop at Stark Tower. 

*

He gives Tony a day to apologize, but Tony doesn’t need a day. Tony doesn’t think he needs to apologize, actually, judging from the way he throws himself down on the couch next to Steve at the mansion that very same evening and acts like nothing happened.

“I don’t like what you said to me earlier today,” Steve says. “I don’t like how you get when you realize there’s something else I don’t know.”

“And how, exactly, do I get?” Tony asks, the words sharp as they slide out past his teeth.

“You get—you get so loud and you talk so fast. You’re so excited to find a new way to shove this new piece of information into my brain, but you don’t care what I do with it afterwards. I’m not even going to talk about the art supplies.”

“Jesus, I’m telling you like I told Bruce, get the damn sketch paper if you want but there’s a  _better way_  of going about this and you won’t have to—“

“I know there’s a better way,” Steve snaps. “I know it because you showed me, I learned it, and I still like drawing on a rough paper with pencils and colored pencils, and your computers can’t change that. I don’t want to click and color things in—“

“Oh my  _God_ ,” Tony moans. “Next you’re telling me that you want to start frequenting music stores looking for vinyl because it just  _sounds_ better than having every song ever recorded available digitally.”

“Well, I’ll never know which I like if you don’t let me see for myself,” Steve says.

Tony grunts and leaves the couch. Steve gives him a few minutes to come back and apologize, but Tony doesn’t come back.

*

“Yeah, I’m very much torn here,” Bruce says as he and Tony read over Steve’s very polite goodbye note—written on paper, the son of a bitch, he couldn’t even have the courtesy to email them that he was running away. “Because I can see that you’re dying to track down the untrackables that are Natasha and Clint, just to prove that you can, but Steve’s also told you that you shouldn’t do that because he might murder you. What are you going to do, Tony?”

“I have to get to the office,” Pepper says as she walks back into the kitchen where they’re gathered. “As much as I would love to stay and yell at you for  _driving Captain America away_ , I need you two to contemplate the fact that  _you drove Captain America away_.”

*

[THE SKETCHBOOK SAGA v.2]

“So, the postal system is dead. Long live email, instant messaging, and texting,” Tony says.

“Right, I got this,” Steve says. He’s sitting at a desk Tony dug up from somewhere beneath the mansion, a notebook computer open in front of him. It’s an Apple. The color scheme is bright and the background, that purple picture of the galaxy (a galaxy, their galaxy, he’s not too sure) is terrific. “Emails are like letters. Texting is  _text messaging_ , the little notes from one phone to another. Instant messaging’s like that, but on your computer. Right?”

“Right—“

“And they’re  _all_  instant!” Steve says.

“Yes!” Tony says.

“This would be more fun in a montage,” Bruce whispers.

Steve frowns.

“Who do you want to email?” Tony asks. “Let’s get a feel for how fast you can pick up on typing before I have JARVIS run some exercises for you to practice. So. Let’s email someone.”

“Um,” Steve says. “Hawkeye. Clint. I’d like to send him a message. Can I do that?”

“Check your bookmarks, go to SHIELD Secure Messaging,” Tony says as he hovers over Steve’s shoulder.

“Could you not do that?” Steve asks. “Standing over me? It makes me nervous.”

“But I need to see every single thing you’re doing to make sure you’re doing it right.”

“No, you don’t,” Steve says. “I’ll be okay. It’s just typing.”

*

[ALTERNATE MESSAGE FROM CLINT]

 **From:** secmsg@shld.int

 **To:** steverogers@stark.com

 **Subject:** COMMUNICATION FROM S.H.I.E.L.D. PERSONNEL

You have received a secure communication from S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel. Please access this message via the link below. You will require the login information provided for you by your S.H.I.E.L.D. contact.

This message was automatically generated. Please do not reply at this address.

\- - -

hi cap,

you’re living with stark now too. you and the big guy are killing me.

nat and i need a break after the loki thing. we’ve had some time owed so we’re taking it. don’t know when we’ll be back. sorry. pizza sounds great. maybe we’ll sneak into the place and kidnap you.

you have fun with the big guy and i guess tony too. see if you can teach either of them english. we’ll see you when we see you. 

nat says hi. she also thinks kidnapping you would be a good idea. not saying you should lie in wait or constant fear but it wouldn’t hurt either. we could be inside the house right now.

cb

*

[STEVE LEAVES]

Steve makes dinner that night and stands in front of the stove, hands up so they don’t knock him over and maul him for food.

“What if we ate in the nice dining room?” Steve asks. “You know, like a meal where we all sat around and looked at each other and talked and stuff?”

“I have a conference call with New Zealand that in an hour that I  _need_  to prepare for,” Pepper says.

“JARVIS,” Tony says, his eyes locked on Steve’s. “What did Steve watch today?”

“Stop invading his privacy,” Bruce says as he elbows Tony’s side.

“ _The Sound of Music_ ,” Steve replies before JARVIS can.

“Oh my God, are you Fraulein Maria’ing us right now?” Tony asks. “You,” Tony says, forcing himself into Steve’s personal space, “You’re suffering from bored housewife syndrome, which I should know because my mom was the  _ultimate_  bored housewife. Here’s the cure:  _do something with your life_.”

Every muscle in Steve’s body clenches and he’s not sure, exactly, why he hasn’t shoved Tony against a wall and shoved an arm against his windpipe, because he’s angry enough to hurt Tony that much and make Tony feel what he feels.  _He_  feels like Tony dug a nail into a scab Steve didn’t know he  _had_  and it wasn’t enough to make the top layer peel off, but Tony had to dig a fingernail in deeper so it could really hurt.

“You’re right,” Steve says. He’s speaking slowly but by some miracle, Tony doesn’t interrupt him. He looks down and sees that his fists are ready to go a few rounds into Tony’s face, so he unclenches them and thinks through his anger.

“You’re right,” Steve repeats. “I need something to do with my time.”

Content that he’s not about to be punched at any moment, Tony sighs with relief. “This is what I’ve been saying.” 

“To who? Not to me.”

“Well, no. We wanted to, you know, give you some time and space!”

“And what have you thought of?” Steve asks. “For me to do?”

Tony stammers because he doesn’t know, and he thinks Steve has never met a fast-talking blowhard. It doesn't matter; Steve already knows that he has to leave tonight. 

*

“All right,” Pepper says. “I need to get to the office, but maybe someone should stay here today and think about why we  _drove Captain America away._  Into the hands of a pair of assassins, by the way, because he would rather be with  _assassins_ than us.”

“They’re pretty nice, though,” Bruce says. “For assassins. Nicest I’ve ever met.”

“That’s good to know. Maybe I’ll run away with them, too.”

“Sneering doesn’t become you,” Tony says. He’s still staring at Steve’s note, written on what’s probably the only sheet of paper in their ultramodern house. He doesn’t think there’s clues on it, but he’s. Baffled? Not surprised? Relieved?

“I’ll make sure to sneer when I smother you in your sleep tonight,” Pepper says. She turns to leave, takes one step and then turns back. “He  _made coffee_  for you, without anyone asking!”

“Dummy made me coffee all the time, no one seemed all that impressed by that. Program the functionality, test it, work out the kinks, put him on a timer, wow, suddenly we have coffee every morning.”

“Steve didn’t have to be nice to you—“ Pepper replies.

“I’m just saying that this hulking—no offense, Bruce, that’s just an accepted body type, all right—golden retriever who was made a superman with a superserum and super-formula and super-fucking-everything has the functionality of the robot arm I built when I was 13 and when all I did was  _point that out_ —“

“And  _I’m_ just saying that both of you geniuses weren’t smart enough to find a way to make time so  _maybe_ he could feel a little more included, and  _maybe_  he would have a reason to do more around here than make you coffee and watch old movies!”

“I think you’re wrong,” Tony says.

“You keep thinking that,” Pepper replies. That time, she leaves the house and they’re no closer to solving for Steve.

*

[ALTERNATE CABIN SCENES]

 

> **A/N:** What Clint, Natasha and Steve talked about on the porch at the cabin. Again, this was too much dialogue about the problems Steve had with Tony, when the real point was supposed to be that Clint, Natasha and Steve understood each other and worked better together as a unit, and made more sense together than Steve trying to push himself into the Bruce-Pepper-Tony dynamic that couldn't welcome or adapt to him at all.  

Steve arrives at Clint's coordinates: a small cabin that seems to have been dropped in a particularly dense patch of trees, like someone knocked out just enough space to fit a cabin and nothing else. The sun's starting to set and that's when Steve looks up to see Natasha standing on the low roof in a black one-piece swimsuit, hands on her hips, her hair dripping water onto her shoulders.

"We heard that wrong turn you took about half a mile back," she says. "Good to know this place is still hard to find."

"I didn't bring anyone with me. Don't worry, it's still _very_  hard to find," he replies. "Just you and Clint here?"

"And now you. Do you want us to come down?"

"No, that's fine, stay up there. Is there a shower inside?"

"Yup, go for it. We're starting on dinner soon, so just... do whatever until we find you."

He tips the bill of his (plain, black, no team affiliation) baseball cap at her and she walks to the back of the roof again as he heads inside, ducking his head because apparently no one taller than 5'10" was ever going to pass through that door.

*

They sit on the back porch that night. Clint has a few tools laid out on a cloth at the small table next to him, using them to fix some clearly old arrows and touch up a bow that Steve hasn't seen before. Natasha sits in a rocking chair on the other side, feet up on the railing, reading an old book, one of about a dozen Steve found in the cabin. They're all old, most of them from libraries in towns he hasn't heard of, and all the covers are well-worn, the pages leafed through again and again. He thinks she's reading _Grimm's Fairy Tales_ , judging from the occasional illustration, but he doesn't ask.

Steve has a book open on his lap, too, but he's sitting on a low bench, sprawled out, closer to Clint because that's where the bench is. He's staring out, glancing at the people he's with sometimes, listening to the everything and nothing around them. It's filling him with a peace that he's never, ever known, maybe a peace he could have found in the Arctic if he hadn't been frozen the entire time. If he hadn't, though, he wouldn't be alive right now for this. He wouldn't have been able to hike 20 miles from where Hill dropped him off at the border between New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and--

He just wouldn't be here.

"How often do you come here?" he asks, because they haven't been sitting out here for so long that the silence is impenetrable.

"After some missions, and other times, too. Sometimes you just need to get away," Clint says. "I'd say it's a few years now since Natasha and I won the place in a game."

"Really? A game?"

Clint looks up and shoots Natasha a grin as he says, "Roulette."

It's really for the best if Steve doesn't ask. 

He leans on his hand and his eyes dart between Clint and Natasha, who are still looking at each other, amused and remembering God _knows_  what, and Steve puts his hand down, gripping the arm of the bench a little. 

"I never got to go somewhere like this when I was a kid," Steve says. "Too many allergies, heart troubles, _more_  allergies—pretty awful stuff. I guess this is my first time out in the real outdoors."

Natasha opens her mouth to say something, then reconsiders and looks down at her book again. Steve and Clint see it and Clint picks up. "Can't imagine life without the outdoors. I traveled a lot as a kid, but that was always a constant. We'd always be less than a mile from some really nice trees and forests, the city'd always be a decent distance away, and that's the way I like it."

"Not thinking of moving into Stark Tower, I take it," Steve says. "He's designing floors for all of us, somewhere between all the labs and office space and that penthouse no one actually uses."

"Still got that Loki-shaped hole in it?" Natasha asks.

"Tony's not sure he ever wants to fix it," Steve laughs. "He thinks he could charge admission for the view and the attraction."

“I'll give him that," Clint says. "Knows how to put on a show."

"That's him to a tee."

He's been here with them a few hours and they haven't asked why he left yet. It's suspicious, but it's Clint and Natasha. He may not know them well, but he knows that discretion and silence are what they _do_. 

Except, maybe he was in the wrong when he left the mansion. 

No, he wasn't. It's one thing to get excited about teaching someone new things, but Tony wanted to make him someone else and Steve still isn't sure who. Maybe Tony thought that the more TV Steve watched, the more texts he sent, the closer he'd get to being like Tony and talking at the speed of light, giving everyone funny nicknames, referencing things no one else remembered. No, he had to leave, he just had to because he couldn't stay if he didn't understand what Tony wanted from him in the first place. He couldn't stay and be remade without knowing what the end result would be. 

He couldn't stay because Tony was being _a jerk_. He's heard that's what Tony does, that's how Tony is, but that's not good enough for Steve. It's no reason to excuse Tony when he doesn't treat Steve well.

"I feel old," Steve says. Clint scoffs.

"Please. You're a baby. What were you when your plane went down, twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?"

"Twenty-five."

"Jesus, " Clint sighs. "You're fine, Cap. You'll stop feeling old when you _are_  old and that'll suck, so don't worry about it."

"I feel a different kind of old, though," Steve says. "Like old man Simmons sitting on his fire escape yelling at us kids to stop being so loud, didn't we know the President was talking? That sort of thing."

"Oh, that's different," Clint says. "Yeah, you're that kind of old."

"Am I? Really?"

Clint shrugs and says, "That's why you're Captain America, isn't it? That's why we all got together and without even saying it, we just knew you were in charge, and you just went for it and it worked out great."

"You're not a curmudgeon, Steve," Natasha says.

"Well, look who woke up," Clint replies.

"Someone had to," Natasha says. "Those are two very different ideas and you're not being clear enough. Stark can be bossy, almost malicious, more than some kids making too much noise, and your intentions are more respectable than _those kids are being too rowdy_." She holds her place in her book with her index finger and looks at Steve. "And that's why you left, isn't it? Why you couldn't wait one more week, one more _day_ , for someone at SHIELD to find you an apartment of your own and get settled; why you had to come find us, specifically us, when we make sure that we can never be found."

Clint has put his tools down, too, and looks from Natasha to Steve, eyes lingering on Natasha again before he looks down at what he's working on. 

"Yes," Steve says, finally. "Teasing's one thing, but disregarding everything I say? Treating me like I'm this fun little puppy that's got so much to learn about the big new world? It stops being playful, and starts being--"

"A reason to dislocate his jaw," Natasha agrees. She twists in her chair so she can sit across it, legs hanging over the arm and her back against the other arm.

"Your back's gonna kill you later," Clint warns.

" _Your_ back, old man," she laughs. "Did Tony tell how he and I met?" Steve shakes his head and he glances at Hawkeye, already grinning excitedly like it's the best story he's ever heard. "SHIELD placed me at his Los Angeles office and Pepper hired me as his assistant, totally unaware of SHIELD or who I was. Director Fury wanted me to watch him, see how far along he was in killing himself and developing an idea for a new reactor running on a new element he'd have to invent."

"Just your typical, fun little summer intern gig, right?" Clint laughs.

"Yeah, right," she replies. "The difference between that Tony Stark-- you should see some of the videos that are online from those few months, I mean, what a disaster-- and this Tony Stark? The one who sacrificed himself for Manhattan? I honestly don't know."

"He's still missing a heart," Clint says. Steve looks at him and he's not amused anymore, laughing at Natasha's story. He's taking care of his bow now, running what looks like a really ancient cloth along it, his focus laser sharp on something as mindless as bow maintenance. "Banner's great, smart, he and Tony do things none of us can understand. And Pepper, right? Fun lady, the couple of times I've met her. She and Tony finish each other's sentences, talk over each other, always on the same page, always picking up his messes and calming people down after he's said some stupid thing or another. Everybody needs a brain, tongue, and heart, and Tony Stark doesn't have a heart." Clint glances at Steve for a second and says, "Without a heart, people make bad calls-- people get hurt. So that's why you're here in the middle of nowhere with us and Tony and the rest keep on keeping on."

It's more sentimental than Steve would have ever expected from Clint _or_  Natasha. Natasha is watching Clint, carefully, like she's about to pounce, though Steve doesn't know why.

"Which are you?" Steve asks Clint, Natasha, both of them.

"Ha, who knows, it was just-- just a thing I said," Clint replies and if he looks down at his bow any longer his neck might actually stay like that. "Something I heard way back when I was a kid, probably, since sounds like the dumb fucking shit people said in a carnival all the goddamn time."

"Clint's a foot," Natasha laughs. "I'm the brains of this operation, and the tongue, thank you."

"I'm totally the tongue," Clint shoots back and there he goes, touching the tip of his nose with his tongue like it's nothing.

There's a silence, the absence of a third voice chiming in, but there's only Steve.

Clint's hands still and he looks up, says to her, "And we did such a good job, Nat. Like, for _so long_ , we did _so well_  keeping our heart right there in plain sight and making sure no one would ever touch him." He clears his throat and says, "Now what?"

And Steve doesn't know.

*

[ALTERNATE SCENE WITH FURY]

 

>   **A/N:** It'll become painfully obvious in the last line why I cut this—WRITING CHECKS MY BODY CAN'T CASH.

“Hell. No.”

The three of them look at Fury and then look at each other for a moment before they look back to Fury.

“Sir?” Steve asks.

“In what flash-frozen, kitten-and-puppy-infested _hell_ would I authorize you three forming a team? I’m serious. I need to hear about this place all three of you visited where it rains sprinkles, Willy Wonka his goddamn self is pawing at the gate trying to get in, and _the three of you_ work as an independent team.”

“We resent that,” Clint says. 

“Oh, _do you_?” Fury asks. “That’s interesting. That’s _real_ interesting. I’ll keep that in mind, Agent Barton, what you do and don’t resent.”

“Sir,” Steve begins. “It’s just a proposal. They know SHIELD much better than I do and if you’ll recall, we said that we wouldn’t expect a real mission for at least 10-12 months.”

“And 12 months is enough time to familiarize you with the global political and socioeconomic climate that covert ops teams rub up against and undermine or overthrow constantly,” Fury says. “Because Stark told me the last movie you watched was _The Sound of Music_ , and that’s not exactly the kind of cutting edge knowledge absorption we were hoping you’d undertake when you went to stay with him. Then you go off the grid for two weeks and resurface with these two—“ Fury looks at Clint and Natasha and sees their best _murder is imminent_ expressions. “You two, who are excellent agents but not my first choice when it comes to the support and protection of Captain America.”

“Steve Rogers,” Natasha corrects. “Not Captain America.”

“And he’d be the one handling us,” Clint adds.

“I was hoping you’d say that again because the first time, I started hearing these high-pitched dog whistles and thought I was losing my mind since it sounded like you wanted Steve Rogers to be your handler.”

Steve notices that Clint’s eyes have shifted into their watcher stare. Fury notices that, too, and focuses his attention on Natasha and Steve.

“Relatively speaking,” Natasha begins, “I’m the one most prepared for field work. Barton and Rogers have a lot of counseling and training for our team to maintain its standards and record, but I can begin the preliminary intelligence work while they jump through all the hoops and red tape that you deem necessary.”

“And I don’t know if you noticed,” Fury interrupts as he addresses Steve, “But you’re not exactly covert ops material anymore.”

“Sir, in what way?” Steve asks. “With all due respect. My face, Steve Rogers’s face, is still mine—I don’t have many distinguishing characteristics, and my uniform—“

Fury rubs a hand down the side of his face and leans against his hand. “And SHIELD’s recruitment initiative just happened to bring in an exceptionally high number of body-building Scandinavians, one of which could almost pass for the clean-cut muscled loaf of Wonder Bread we call Captain America.”

Steve slams his hand on the table and immediately stills his arm. He’s disturbed, more than everyone around the table with him, that he lost his temper, and he apologizes. _Dammit_ , he thinks to himself as he closes his eyes for the briefest moment.

“Director Fury, I’m a soldier,” Steve says. “And if the U.S. Army took me when I weighed not even half of what I do now, when I had asthma, heart troubles, allergies, everything you could ever imagine, what makes you think I’ll stop here?”

“What if I said that I already _have_ your handler ready to go back into the field with you?” Fury asks, looking to Natasha and Clint, his glance lingering on Clint longer than it should.


End file.
